I thought you might enjoy this. I did. Maybe you've already read it. It's long- I apologize for that- I didn't WRITE it.
Doubt
Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German
bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she
was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then.
Edith Stein, recently and controversially beatified by the Pope, who
had successfully worked to transform an existential vocabulary into
a theological one, was taken to Auschwitz in August, 1942.
Two years later Simone Weil died in a hospital in England — of
illness and depression — determined to know what it is to know.
She, as much as Woolf, sought salvation in a choice of words.
But multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact
vocabulary.
While a whole change in discourse is a sign of conversion, the
alteration of a single word only signals a kind of doubt about the
value of the surrounding words.
Poets tend to hover over words in this troubled state of mind. What
holds them poised in this position is the occasional eruption of
happiness.
While we would all like to know if the individual person is a
phenomenon either culturally or spiritually conceived and why
everyone doesn't kill everyone else, including themselves, since they
can — poets act out the problem with their words.
Why not say "heart-sick" instead of "despairing"?
Why not say "despairing" instead of "depressed"?
Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person — hidden like a laugh
inside a sob — that loves even more than it loves to live? If there is,
can it be expressed in the form of the lyric line?
Dostoevsky defended his later religious belief, saying of his work,
"Even in Europe there have never been atheistic expressions of such
power. My hosannah has gone through a great furnace of doubt."
According to certain friends, Simone Weil would have given
everything she wrote to be a poet. It was an ideal but she was wary
of charm and the inauthentic. She saw herself as stuck in fact with a
rational prose line for her surgery on modern thought. She might be
the archetypal doubter but the language of the lyric was perhaps too
uncertain.
As far as we know she wrote a play and some poems and one little
prose poem called "Prelude."
Yet Weil could be called a poet, if Wittgenstein could, despite her
own estimation of her writing, because of the longing for a
transformative insight dominating her word choices.
In "Prelude" the narrator is an uprooted seeker who still hopes that a
conversion will come to her from the outside. The desired teacher
arrives bearing the best of everything, including delicious wine and
bread, affection, tolerance, solidarity (people come and go) and
authority. This is a man who even has faith and loves truth.
She is happy. Then suddenly, without any cause, he tells her it's
over. She is out on the streets without direction, without memory.
Indeed she is unable to remember even what he told her without his
presence there to repeat it, this amnesia being the ultimate
dereliction.
If memory fails, then the mind is air in a skull.
This loss of memory forces her to abandon hope for either rescue or
certainty.
And now is the moment where doubt — as an active function —
emerges and magnifies the world. It eliminates memory. And it turns
eyesight so far outwards, the vision expands. A person feels as if
she is the figure inside a mirror, looking outwards for her moves.
She is a forgery.
When all the structures granted by common agreement fall away and
that "reliable chain of cause and effect" that Hannah Arendt talks
about — breaks — then a person's inner logic also collapses. She
moves and sees at the same time, which is terrifying.
Yet strangely it is in this moment that doubt shows itself to be the
physical double to belief; it is the quality that nourishes willpower,
and the one that is the invisible engine behind every step taken.
Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.
In this prose poem Weil's narrator recovers her balance after a
series of reactive revulsions to the surrounding culture by confessing
to the most palpable human wish: that whoever he was, he loved
her.
Hope seems to resist extermination as much as a roach does.
Hannah Arendt talks about the "abyss of nothingness that opens up
before any deed that cannot be accounted for." Consciousness of
this abyss is the source of belief for most converts. Weil's conviction
that evil proves the existence of God is cut out of this consciousness.
Her Terrible Prayer — that she be reduced to a paralyzed nobody
— desires an obedience to that moment where coming and going
intersect before annihilation.
And her desire: "To be only an intermediary between the blank page
and the poem" is a desire for a whole-heartedness that eliminates
personality.
Virginia Woolf, a maestro of lyric resistance, was frightened by
Freud's claustrophobic determinism since she had no ground of
defense against it. The hideous vocabulary of mental science
crushed her dazzling star-thoughts into powder and brought her
latent despair into the open air.
Born into a family devoted to skepticism and experiment, she had
made a superhuman effort at creating a prose-world where doubt
was a mesmerizing and glorious force.
Anyone who tries, as she did, out of a systematic training in
secularism, to forge a rhetoric of belief is fighting against the odds.
Disappointments are everywhere waiting to catch you, and an ironic
realism is so convincing.
Simone Weil's family was skeptical too, secular and attentive to the
development of the mind. Her older brother fed her early sense of
inferiority with his condescending intellectual putdowns. Later, her
notebooks chart a superhuman effort at conversion to a belief in
affliction as a sign of God's presence.
Her prose itself is tense with effort. After all, to convert by choice
(that is, without a blast of revelation or a personal disaster) requires
that you shift the names for things, and force a new language out of
your mind onto the page.
You have to make yourself believe. Is this possible? Can you turn
"void" into "God" by switching the words over and over again?
Any act of self-salvation is a problem because of death which
always has the last laugh, and if there has been a dramatic and
continual despair hanging over childhood, then it may even be
impossible.
After all, can you call "doubt" "bewilderment" and suddenly be
relieved?
Not if your mind has been fatally poisoned... But even then, it
seems, the dream of having no doubt continues, finding its way into
love and work where choices matter exactly as much as they don't
matter — when history's things are working in your favor. |
