uncomplicatedly

Yesterday I had the minorly excruciating and entirely bizarre experience of sitting through three hours of personal introductions on the first day of a nine-person seminar class. The class, which I am considering auditing, is being taught by a Jesuit monk turned professor turned journalist and recently re-turned professor, so perhaps he doesn’t know that most graduate seminars consist of intellectual exchanges between people who, for the most part, don’t know each other very well outside the classroom and form their ideas of one another largely on the basis of how smart they manage to sound when talking about the assigned texts. Most graduate seminars begin with “introductions,” but these take the form of “Hi, I’m Mary, I’m a second year in the English department, and I work on Victorian novels.” This professor, by contrast, demanded that each of us give an account of our relationship to Americanness, to religion, and to poetry (this being a class on American religious poetry), and then proceeded to interrupt each of us numerous times with sincerely interested questions. “Oh, what town in Texas was that?” “Would you say your connection to Catholicism is more cultural, then?” etc. For the nine of us to account for ourselves and answer his questions in sufficient detail took the whole three hours allotted for the seminar, which was on the one hand excruciatingly boring and on the other hand fascinating.

What fascinated me was not the particular details of my colleagues’ stories (though they sometimes were quite interesting), but the process of accounting for myself in this way, and of watching other people do the same thing. My “religion” and my “poetry” stories are both things I have recounted so many times that my telling of them in class today was more like a recitation than a process of self-discovery — but my “American” answer was a little more roughshod, and I ended up feeling dissatisfied with it, like I hadn’t really expressed what I’d wanted to. What happened, actually, was that I recited a couple of things about my parents’ families, but I didn’t really get a chance to think or talk about my own “American” experience, which has far more to do with my growing up in suburban New Jersey than with my mother’s family being Irish potato famine immigrants.

Whether or not it was true, it looked to me that my colleagues’ stories were, for the most part, more “authentic” than my own — they seemed to be answering these questions for the first time, and saying something “real,” rather than just rattling off the stories they’d told to themselves and their friends a billion times before. I realized immediately, even as I was having this thought, that it probably wasn’t true; it was just that since I was hearing their stories for the first time, they seemed more spontaneous.

I began to think, while walking home, that it would be a very interesting exercise to try to write one’s autobiography — or even just bits of it — completely without the help of one’s familiar store of stories about oneself. That is, to try to dig up and put into words the parts of your life that you’d never put into words before, not even to yourself. It may be that I’m an academic and a writer, or it may just be that I’m a human and everybody does this, but I am constantly, constantly telling myself stories about myself. Even as I know that I’m fictionalizing and oversimplifying, it’s helpful and reassuring to be able to trace certain kinds of continuity, to be able to say “I presently feel this way because of these other things that happened in the past” and “I did that terrible thing because I couldn’t help it, that is the kind of thing I have always done, but at least I did it less terribly this time.”

I suspect that, the farther back I tried to reach in my past without the aid of my stories, the less I would find. From my elementary school years, I don’t think there’s a single thing my mind could touch that is not already part of my Grand Narrative. But from middle school, and certainly later, there must be things lurking in my mind that are not crystallized into words in the same way that the more “important” events are.

I recently gave a paper at a conference on excess and obsession, which is one reason why I’ve been driven to think about the above things. In a lot of ways, the most illuminating panel at the conference turned out to be the one I had most snickered about to my friends beforehand: the panel on fandom. What the fandom scholars were able to articulate that the more traditional scholars (myself included) were not was, more or less, that what we are talking about when we are talking about “excess,” in any kind of literary/cultural way, is emotion, and that emotion is embarrassing. When you’re a Trekkie, a Xenaphile, or an emo kid, you are identifying with an emotional attachment that is viewed with skepticism by the rest of society because of its publicness and because of its fervor. It seems to me that we are generally expected, these days, to have our emotions quietly and at home. (And hasn’t this always been the case? With the brief subcultural exception of the Summer of Love?)

Many of the conference participants, in other words, seemed to be coding “excess” as “authentic,” to be buying into the idea that that which is unarticulated is unspoiled in much the same vein as my autobiography speculations above. This was particularly true of the queer theorists, at least two of whom focused on queer reading practice as something that draws on textual possibilities rather than textual actualities to move toward an imagined utopian future that is acknowledged as imagined, and yet still must be imagined.

I found their frankness about possibility very helpful. There probably are parts of my life that I haven’t articulated to myself, but the minute I discover them I begin to articulate them, and they become assimilated into the already-existing Grand Narrative, becoming just more examples of this or that Trend In My Life At That Time. Perhaps the only way these parts of my history can have power is as possibilities, as dark corners that remain dark. One of the keynote speakers at the conference remarked that, as a writer, “one has to hide one’s intent” — when I asked him in the Q&A to elaborate, he more or less said that your intent is not going to sell books; that you have to give readers something they want, and smuggle your “real” message in the back door. I can empathize, of course. Nearly every paper in my academic career has had the secret or not-so-secret message of “please please try to love one another,” and I think I would not be exaggerating to say that many, if not most, enduring works of art have exactly this message as well. But slapping a sticker on the front of Ulysses reading “LOVE IS IN HERE” would not particularly have helped Joyce sell more copies — because, as I said, emotion is embarrassing. You have to give readers something else to tell themselves that they want: the challenge of the experimentation, the pleasure of the text, the possibility of pornography, etc.

Probably the best readings of texts are the ones that leave some of the dark places unlit. Psyche should not have lit her lamp to look on Cupid’s face, and love suffers in the labeling.

Tomemos has just written a post that, in an alternate universe, I might have written myself. Honeymooning in Mexico, he decided that since it was so difficult to eat satisfyingly as a vegetarian there, he might as well permit himself to sample some of the local carnivorous cuisine. I have just returned from a vacation in New Orleans, which is also no picnic for us veggies — its chief cuisines include cajun, which is full of seafood and sausage, and barbecue. It also features a bunch of upscale restaurants run by famous chefs such as Emeril, Paul Prudhomme, and Susan Spicer, none of whom have any vegetarian entrees on their menus. For the first time in years, I began to experience “meat ideation,” in which I would picture myself stealing a bite from my brother’s plate of lobster with no intention of actually doing so, in much the way a depressed person crossing a bridge might picture herself jumping.

I did not succumb to these temptations. Unlike Tomemos, who says he’s “never been one of those vegetarians who is appalled by the thought of eating meat unknowingly,” I once wept openly in an airport food court upon discovering that the burrito I had been happily eating contained shrimp. It was embarrassing, and I wish I could be a little more relaxed about it, but I just felt so bad for those poor shrimp. (It was kind of like this.)

A high school girl that I tutor in writing recently told me that she’s trying to go vegetarian, but keeps falling off the wagon. I told her that she shouldn’t try to impose an absolute prohibition on herself, but rather to think of herself as trying to eat less meat. That way, eating the occasional hamburger doesn’t become a sin that makes her want to give up her whole project. I was interested to read that Tomemos’ carnivorous experiments actually reinforced his convictions:

In the end, though, I think this experiment ended up strengthening my vegetarianism. The fish tacos tasted good; they didn’t make me feel like I had been missing out on something amazing for fifteen years. At one point during our trip, I had a vegetarian tostada, and that was as satisfying a meal as anything else I ate in Mexico. Taste is possibly the most transitory aesthetic experience: even if you eat a meal that you remember for the rest of your life—and I’ve had one or two—it can’t make you want to live a different way. My feelings on eating meat are unchanged: for me, it is a moral issue, but not a moral absolute.

This was immensely reassuring, because it appeared that amazing things were happening on my family members’ plates and I was a little bit jealous. I’m sure they were great, but the truth was that I managed to eat pretty well. Most decent restaurants will fix you a vegetarian plate even if it’s not on the menu, something I didn’t learn until I’d been one for a few years. At first, I hated having to order them — I felt like I was being a nuisance, and I resented the restaurants for putting me in that position in the first place. Over the years I’ve gotten used to it, but it wasn’t until this trip to New Orleans that I began to actually appreciate the experience. You see, ordering a vegetarian plate gives you a unique relationship to the chef. Some will just give you a collection of their side dishes, which can be a bummer, but some will look around at their kitchens, see what’s on hand, and improvise something special for you. If taste is the most transitory aesthetic experience, it is also one of the most intimate, and I am grateful to all the chefs who have ever taken extra time to consider my needs. While my family members struggled with difficult choices, I would be sitting serenely with a closed menu, waiting to see what delightful thing the chef would do for me. I didn’t feel restricted — I felt more free.

One summer in college, I lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. One afternoon, I was assigned the job of sweeping out the spider webs from the temple’s windows. “But won’t that kill the spiders?” I asked. The monk responded, “We avoid harming other creatures when we can, but sometimes we have to. It’s not our intention to kill the spiders, but we need to clean our windows. You should bow to the spiders, say ‘Omitofo,’ and pray that they get reborn as humans.” This seems like a sensible attitude to me, certainly more sensible than crying over a few accidentally-eaten shrimp. We should honor all creatures, even and especially when circumstances beyond our control require us to harm them.

The New York Times’ Style section ran two articles this weekend advising readers on how to make peace with the experience of receiving a bad gift. The Sweater Only a Mom (and Analyst) Could Love by Matthew Weiner argues that most gifts are disappointing because of the anticipation programmed into us by movies and commercials depicting scenes of joyous, perfect gift-receiving involving ribbons and hugs and tears:

But the reality is that getting a gift is like being set up on a blind date. Like it or not, your friend or family member is sending you a message telling you in a coded way what they think you want, what you deserve and, on some level, who they think you are.

In What Do You Mean, Giving Me That?, Guy Trebay reflects that “the strange and the ambiguous and the mixed and and the heartbreaking intentions behind gift-giving are an overlooked bonus.” Furthermore, he writes:

I feel less lost at Christmas if I conjure an image of the person she was imagining I might become. If the problem with presents is that they reveal too much, that is also their value. Even with the most ludicrous or empty of presents, the exercise of following the object back to its intention is beneficial.

I was struck by how identical these messages were. First of all, are we actually expecting bad gifts now? Are we so pessimistic that the Times had to run two articles mentally preparing us for the experience? But if it’s interesting that these two pieces address the same problem, it’s even more interesting that they propose the same solution. “It’s the thought that counts” is a commonplace, but both these authors play a new tune on the old saw by specifying that one ought to think about the person that the gift-giver imagines one to be. This turns gift-receiving into an occasion for reflecting on the mystery of our relationships — I am surely not the person that my aunt imagines would love to wear a long, faux-tribal necklace made of seashells, but she loves me in spite of and because of this inaccuracy. We can only know each other through fantasies — filters — veils.

Sylvia Plath confronts precisely this question in “A Birthday Present”, which I recommend that you go read before continuing further (it’s just a little too long to reprint here). The first time I read this poem, knowing the standard Plath suicide mythology, I figured that the unnamed gift the speaker longs for was obviously death: “Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. // Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty / By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.” But the gift is stubbornly unspecified, and the only time it is called “death” is in the conditional: “If it were death // I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.” This opens the door to other possibilities, and in a few places the poem outright contradicts the “death” reading — “only you can give it to me,” for example, doesn’t seem to refer to death, especially given Plath’s multiple suicide attempts. What is it, then, that can only be given by a particular “you”?

Let’s look at the first lines: “What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? / Is it shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? // I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.” Here, the desired “it” is at least possibly a person. I propose a counter-reading, then — both alongside and against the “death” reading — that what the speaker yearns for is the truth of the other person. She rails at this person to “let down the veil, the veil,” but this is impossible because this person sees “only transparencies, clear air.”

Death stands for profound otherness here, for anything “beyond the veil” and unknowable. But we must recognize veils before we can contest them. This is what the Times’ columnists are trying to tell us about gifts: they are rare opportunities to see how others see us. But if it’s true that we always see each other through veils, then every gift ought to be a “bad” one, to some degree. Somehow, this is not true. Weiner closes his article with an anecdote about the one good gift he received that ruined him for all others — he was a struggling writer supported by his wife’s meager salary and feeling like a failure, when the following happened:

My birthday came, and the gift I wanted was to be shot in the back of the head while I slept — to be mercifully put out of my misery before I gained any more weight or finished the extremely depressing movie I was writing.

My wife handed me a large, very heavy flat box. Inside was a silver Zero Halliburton briefcase.

Now, if you missed the ’80s, let me explain what this was. It was the ultimate briefcase. It was the one you saw in the movies, carried by Feds, moguls, guys in sports cars, drug dealers. It was the kind that was filled with rows of hundreds and then handcuffed to somebody’s wrist. I had admired one in a window at the mall. My wife had clocked that and delivered. It cost $300. Our rent was $800 a month.

It was so extravagant, so ridiculous, so desired. I was speechless. My wife knew what I wanted. I wanted to feel successful. I wanted to go somewhere everyday with my papers in that gleaming hand-held Learjet.

When I saw that gift, I knew that no matter what I felt like, she somehow saw me as the kind of person who carried that thing. She somehow saw me as a success. And yes, there were hugs and kisses and tears.

The reason this gift is so successful is that the way the wife sees the husband is the way the husband wants to see himself — which is very different from the way he does see himself. This anecdote also calls to mind Jacques Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, in which he argues that for a gift to truly be a gift, it has to be unrepayable. Most gifts are not really gifts, because they open up cycles of debt and repayment — once you give somebody something, they are obligated to reciprocate. It’s been a long time since I read it and I don’t have it on hand, but I think he does eventually admit that unrepayable gifts are possible — but only if the gift itself is, in a sense, impossible, as in the case of the Halliburton briefcase. What makes this gift impossible is not only that it is “so extravagant, so ridiculous, so desired,” but that it literally does not correspond to reality — Weiner was not the kind of person who carried that thing, but his wife knew that he could be, and now he is writing for the New York Times as well as executive-producing Mad Men and The Sopranos.

This leads me to a different and better reading of Plath’s poem: it is not just the true self of the other person that she wants — though this is part of it — but her own true self. Here is the end of the poem:

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

What the speaker wants is for the other person’s knife not to impose its own order by “carving,” but to simply cut her open. Death turns into birth, and “the universe” inside her becomes visible. Good gifts, then, can teach us something about who we are — just because our loved ones’ perceptions of us are not always the same as our own doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Love gives us to ourselves.

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.” — Jean Baudrillard, America

“Life, friends, is boring,” proclaims Henry at the beginning of Berryman’s fourteenth Dream Song. If you’ve ever been on a lengthy car trip, you know that there are few things more boring. Sometimes the road brings startling things into your path, but there are long, barren stretches in between. Sometimes you are blessed with a conversation partner, but even the chattiest of friends runs out of steam after a few hours. Sometimes there is something good on the radio, but most of the time it’s country, preaching, static, or something you’ve heard thirty thousand times before. And every few hours, you have to stop for gas, food, the bathroom.

Gabriel Gudding’s brand-new Rhode Island Notebook (Nov 23 2007, Dalkey Archive Press) is a book of poetry that was handwritten in notebooks as Gudding drove back and forth between Illinois and Rhode Island twenty-six times. It is a book that embraces boredom and transforms it, proving that the author is firmly in touch with his “Inner Resources.” It is a record of mileage, billboards, and bug splats, but it is also a record of loss, suffering, and redemption. Here’s an excerpt:

My thighs
Are hot with coffee, you can’t
solve or remove or understand
suffering, you really can’t
understand anything. The best
you can do, 1:49am, while thinking is see
similarities among particularities jesus
what the shit am I talking about, best you
can do is to keep a loving heart 79000m Odo
844.7m fr Providence Tractor & trailer
in the ditch. Pee 2 AM
Newsflash: I don’t need

to get anything from the world.

I had planned for my series on the poetics of attention to proceed in an orderly manner from Frost to Stevens to Williams, etc, but Gudding’s book is such a stunning example that I felt compelled to inform you immediately. I wrote in my last entry that the demands of attention are always contradictory — we must be open to the world, but we also must perform the tasks of synthesis and analysis which require our abstraction from the world. Gudding’s text is constantly interrupting itself as he moves between these two modes. There are lengthy meditations on subjects such as literary narcissism, the importance of dung, Nancy Reagan’s life as a psychotic nightmarish eagle, and the meaning of suffering, but even these extended treatises are peppered throughout with the sort of information you see above — the odometer, the traffic conditions, the stops to pee. The very process of reading the book becomes a kind of exercise in attention; it’s tempting to treat this information as “noise,” skimming past it to get to the good stuff (Nancy Reagan’s nipples are made of nickel!), but it serves an important function — namely, it grounds the whole book in a continuous present. Even if you skip over these textual details, they’re there, as insistent and banal as the facts themselves, reminding you where Gudding is, what the weather’s like, and how long he’s been on the road. You are confronted with your desire to filter, to privilege information about Gudding’s mind over information about his body or his car.

It is a profoundly lonely book. The trips Gudding makes back and forth between Illinois and Rhode Island are undertaken in order to see his wife and daughter, who live half a continent away. Over the course of the book, the marriage falls apart and the trips become less frequent. Gudding is almost always alone in the car — very occasionally his daughter is with him — yet the book is not claustrophobic, because Gudding’s mind is always reaching outward, observing and fantasizing and reflecting. Though the divorce is the book’s main “plot” line, very few of its details are discussed. The real throughline is the gradual sea-change in Gudding’s emotional states: the narration is always heterogeneous, but at the start of the book we see him being flippant and vitriolic about a wide range of subjects (including, importantly, the start of the Iraq war and the concordant rise in patriotic bumper-stickers) more often than not. As the divorce starts to become real, he starts to report his emotional states as though they were more roadside facts, as here:

88m fr. Providence. Am
incredibly sad. blue steel
double-arch “dromedary” bridge
over Quinnipiac River 95m

The book is structured around the epic conventions of anabasis and katabasis, the descent into and march up from hell. As it progresses, and he begins to process his loss, the notebooks (which are still, as before, assiduously reporting road conditions) begin to reflect a change in focus and a change in resolve.

In the prologue, Gudding refers to a notebook as “a road through emptiness, a sea sewn to a spine.” It records your journey, but more than that, it makes your life into a journey, by giving it epochs with beginnings, middles, and ends even if they are bounded arbitrarily by the number of pages. I too am a keeper of notebooks; they are similarly full of debris, but when I start a new one or end an old one I am forced to give an account of myself, to take stock. In between, the things I scratch down furtively in train stations and coffeehouses become my definitive history. I opened one at random today, and found this on 4/13/02: “Am I really going to be doing this for the rest of my life? Putting words in sequences on a page? Shouldn’t I go do something useful, like build a bridge? But I am building a bridge, if you think about it. A bridge from me to ‘you’ even if you is just a page in a notebook or another part of myself. My tea is cold. Fuck.”

John Ashbery said in a 1981 interview that, “Most of my poems are about the experience of experience. I’m trying to set down a generalized transcript of what’s really going on in our minds all day long.” I love him deeply, but somehow my mind fails to produce transcripts like his: “The immense hope, and forbearance / Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day / Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled / As night returns bringing doubts”. Gudding’s Notebook is much more like mind as I know it — full of nonsense, full of noise, easily distracted, self-obsessed, but occasionally brilliant. It is, in many ways, a relief.

I realize I’ve said “I’m back for real” a couple of different times now, but this time I think I mean it: I’m back for real. The past few months have been consumed by studying for and taking my Ph.D. qualifying exams, and now that I’ve passed them I am not only much more free to blog but I also have a large backlog of thoughts about poetry that need articulating. So, I hope you’ll welcome me back into your arms and RSS readers as I work through some of this stuff.

As you may remember, a few months ago I promised to write a post on Robert Frost. Now, my primary sympathies as a reader and a scholar are for avant-garde poetry. I had a roommate at summer camp when I was fifteen who loved Frost and read him out loud to me, and behind her back I used to cite this along with her playing the bassoon and preferring math problems to Friday night dances as evidence of her incurable boringness. But my “Twentieth Century American Poetry” exam list included both the raw and the cooked, and I’ve started to see more in the century’s more “traditional” poetry than I used to.

When I made that promise, I was thinking of a poem by Frost called “Hyla Brook” that is particularly relevant to the issues I was exploring in my previous post regarding D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and the trip back east that I had just taken. The question at hand, to put it plainly, was: given that everything is ever-changing and that other people will never be fully known to us, must we reconcile ourselves to loving phantoms and fantasies? Here’s the poem:

Hyla Brook
by Robert Frost

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow) –
Or flourished and come up in jewelweed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent,
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat –
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

The Hyla is a kind of tree frog, but it’s also worth noting that in Greek mythology, Hylas was the Argonaut who was lured into the water by the water nymphs and disappeared without a trace. Here, the brook itself disappears — it dries up so thoroughly that it is not even properly a brook anymore. Only those “who remember long” would refer to it that way; a newcomer would see not a brook, but simply a swath of jewelweed.

The last four lines make it clear that we are not just talking about brooks here. The poem is in fact a criticism directed against “songs” that take brooks “otherwhere” — in other words, against poetry that idealizes, romanticizes, and immortalizes. Against this kind of “song,” the speaker affirms a love that is realistic, that is in the present tense, and most importantly, that is attentive. The speaker, unlike those other songsters, loves the brook even when it’s not a brook. It’s true that he sees the past in the present (he remembers the frogs, and how even they called to mind the earlier snows), but this is not the same as portraying the brook at the height of its babbling ecstasy as though its Platonic form were the only one that mattered.

Frost is the beginning of what I’m coming to think of as an aesthetic practice of humble attention in a certain tradition of American poetry in the 20th century. Frost inherits his rural persona and natural settings from Whitman and also from the British Romantics, but he rejects their excesses as sentimental and instead crafts verse that is variously described as “stern,” “reticent,” and, well, “boring.” In the series of posts I wrote this spring on Simone Weil and Georges Bataille, I explored the ethics of attention — I claimed that for Weil, attention to others (and the associated self-emptying) was a necessary first step for ethical action, while for Bataille, attention to the realities of one’s contradictory self was that necessary step. In the series I am starting today, I plan to examine the aesthetics of attention — how is attention figured by poets, and to what ends? Why is it so often accompanied by stoicism — that is, by a suppression of affect? And why, ultimately, should we care?

One reason to care is that attention is the way out of the problem posed by the ever-changing world and its “sealed” inhabitants, to use Virginia Woolf’s word (from To the Lighthouse). In order to love the things we love for what they are, we must be outward-turning, we must be generous, we must pay attention.

“Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.”
— Wallace Stevens, from “Sunday Morning”

Hello again dear readers. I had a post in mind about Robert Frost that was actually going to be relevant to the topics I was exploring last time, but that will have to wait because today my heart cries out to write about Sappho. I was dutifully reading some Amy Lowell for my upcoming Ph.D. exams, when I came across the following passage in her poem “The Sisters”:

There’s Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.
I know a single slender thing about her:
That, loving, she was like a burning birch tree
All tall and glittering fire, and that she wrote
Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,
A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.

Holy Jesus, I thought. Amy Lowell, sometimes you really do succeed at Imagism no matter what Ezra Pound says. This image, it’s perfect. That is Sappho exactly. Observe Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s Fragment 31 from her beautiful, necessary book If Not, Winter:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
I seem to me.

People have been translating Sappho for centuries, and these translations reflect the poetic styles of the time. My books are all packed away in boxes, with the exception of my poetry shelf, but otherwise I’d whip out Yopie Prins’ Victorian Sappho and share with you some of the florid, iambic-pentameter ways the above has been rendered. I love the sparseness of Carson’s Sappho, because the fragmentary nature of her text is essential to our experience of it today. It’s interesting to think about: Sappho was presumably not, herself, a reticent riddler, but because her manuscripts were scattered by the winds of time (and torn into strips to wrap corpses in Egypt!), her poems today exist only in scraps and tatters. She has been a huge influence on verse, particularly verse by women, inspiring a whole ideal of sparse, cryptic, reticent lyric, without herself ever quite having been any of those things.

Part of what people are inspired by, then, must be the action of history on Sappho’s text. When H.D. writes her fragmentary verse, she is imitating not Sappho, but what time has done to Sappho. She inscribes the violence of forgetting into her poems. Anne Carson, in turn, is influenced by H.D. and others like her; her own verse has a similar sparseness. When she applies this style to her translations of Sappho, what we get is loss squared. 75% of Carson’s book is white space; she puts only one fragment on each page, even if it is only three words long. The words cry out to be understood, and incite the imagination to try to figure out what is missing.

But Lowell is right: the glimpses we get are of a magnificently strange voice, speaking of powerful love. Even the smallest of fragments sing. For example, Fragment 125:

I used to weave crowns

The silence surrounding this becomes profound, even if Sappho didn’t write it that way. Well, and what now? Who did you weave them for? Why have you stopped? Why is this no longer a world made for crowns?

Today I discovered what has instantly become my favorite love poem ever. Are you ready for it? Fragment 45:

as long as you want

What do you think? Should I get it tattooed between my shoulderblades? Maybe in the Greek, so I don’t quite give myself away.

“And if you don’t believe in love, what do you believe in?” she asked, mocking. “Simply in the end of the world, and grass?”

— D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

When we made that last, familiar left turn just around the bend I was shocked. I had expected all the greenery of an east coast summer to come as a comfort, a sight for sore desert eyes, but instead the forest I grew up in just made me feel claustrophobic. When I was twelve, my family left the forest to visit New Mexico, and the desert terrified me. I was used to being wrapped in a sylvan blanket, and all those wide open spaces left me feeling exposed and vulnerable on all sides. Now that I’ve been living out west for three years, it’s the east that unsettles me.

In conversation, I’ve stopped referring to these trips as “going home” and started referring to them as “visiting my parents” or “going back east for awhile.” I may have only moved west three years ago, but it’s been fully seven since this town was a place I lived in for more than a few weeks at a time. And yet despite the shift in nomenclature, this place is incredibly important to me. I am continually blindsided by my own history: here is the pond where I never caught any fish, here is the movie theater where I had my exhilarating but awkward first date, here is the intersection where I forgot you can’t turn left on red.

But this place persists in my absence, and it changes. My parents have a new kitchen, my middle school has a new science wing, and they tore down the ghetto A&P and put up a shiny new Whole Foods. When I come back to visit, I can get into strange hallucinatory moods: I project the used bookstore on top of the Starbucks that has taken its place, and I prefer my daydream.

Over time, I’ve developed a series of rituals that help stave off some of this weirdness and make this place feel more like home. There is a local pub it is imperative I visit. There are records in my mother’s collection that I absolutely must listen to (I Got Dem Ol’ Kosmic Blues Again Mama!, Pearl, American Beauty, Nashville Skyline). And I need to take a long luxurious bubble bath with a glass of wine and a good book. But by far the most significant ritual is the whirlwind visit to New York City in which I try to see as many old, dear friends as possible over the course of a single weekend. I just got back from one of these which was a stunning success; the complex scheduling came off perfectly, and every minute of all three days was spent in the company of completely marvelous people.

Of course, it’s easy to be a visiting celebrity. You become everybody’s number one social priority, and you don’t have to pay for your drinks. On these trips I feel like a comet, arcing brilliantly through the sky and making headline news, only to disappear and leave folks to their pedestrian local constellations until my orbit brings me back around again.

I always come back from these trips feeling supremely loved. Sometimes on these trips I receive actual confessions of love, which I am always careful to take kindly but with a grain of salt — it’s easy to love somebody you see twice a year; it’s much much harder to love somebody you see every day.

I am presently smack in the middle of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, a book whose mystical sensibilities appeal to me greatly but whose gender dynamics leave me a little queasy. Yesterday on the train I read the following marvelously interesting passage: Rupert and Ursula (the names in this book are fantastic) are acquaintances who have recently had one or two philosophical-type arguments, the most recent of which was about the nature of love. A few days later, Rupert invites Ursula and her sister Gudrun (I kid you not!) over for tea, and Ursula deliberately fails to bring Gudrun because she’s pretty sure that last conversation meant something important. Rupert immediately cuts to the chase: “I can’t say it is love I have to offer — and it isn’t love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder — and rarer.” Rupert is suspicious of love for essentially the reasons that Kugelmass laid out and that I responded to a few months ago in our posts on Neruda. Rupert says, “There is a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you — not in the emotional, loving plane — but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me.” O, the infinite otherness of the other!

Ursula is hurt. The word “love” is important to her; she thinks Rupert is dodging the question. She asks him, mockingly, whether he thinks she’s good looking.

“Don’t you see that it’s not a question of visual appreciation in the least,” he cried. “I don’t want to see you. I’ve seen plenty of women, I’m sick and weary of seeing them. I want a woman I don’t see.”
“I’m sorry I can’t oblige you by being invisible,” she laughed.
“Yes,” he said, “you are invisible to me, if you don’t force me to be visually aware of you. But I don’t want to see you or hear you.”
“What did you ask me to tea for, then?” she mocked.
But he would take no notice of her. He was talking to himself.
“I want to find you, where you don’t know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly. But I don’t want your good looks, and I don’t want your womanly feelings, and I don’t want your thoughts nor your opinions nor your ideas — they are all bagatelles to me.”

Rupert’s wish here actually sounds a lot like a line in the Neruda poem that Kugelmass and I were writing about: “Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.” It is intended to be an expression of not just love, but more than love. Where love concerns itself with trifles such as a person’s physical presence and thoughts and ideas, this kind of regard concerns itself with deep spiritual truth — a mystical truth that is beyond attributes and is only and purely essential. While I appreciate that Rupert’s vision tries to be honest about the isolated human condition, I also think that it’s total bullshit. Rupert is such a thoroughgoing narcissist — or such a coward — (and when is there much of a difference?) — that he cannot imagine what it would be like to actually deal with another person. He would rather strip away all of Ursula’s specificity than try to understand it. He keeps insisting that his ideal model for their relationship is two stars in orbit around one another, holding one another in balance. But the problem with loving stars or loving comets is that they are nothing but points of light. You can’t tell one from another, and you can’t ask them to tea. And what is this hidden inner self, and how would Rupert come to know it at all? All he can ever get from Ursula are the outward, physical signs of her inner self, and to reject those is to reject the real, material person in favor of a fantasy.

This is why I smile gently and change the subject whenever a person on the east coast tries to tell me about their undying affection. What is your affection for, sir? How often do you and I even speak to one another? This town is not the only thing that’s changed; the people in it must inevitably see me with the same hallucinatory vision, projecting the girl with pigtails on top of the one with short-cropped hair. And yet it would be entirely wrong to say that my friends here and I don’t share real love. I miss them when I’m gone; I care about them deeply. A case could even be made that my faraway friends and I take our relationships with each other much more seriously than my day-to-day friends and I generally do, because our time together is so precious. But if we call this love, is it not the love of shadows?

I apologize, again, for my extended absence. A personal crisis has kept me out of the blogosphere and firmly entrenched in the real world, dealing with practical matters. Things should be settling down soon, though, and I promise to return with gloriously eloquent thoughts on Modernist novels and Korean monster movies and all of the other important things in life.

Today I am pleased to introduce you to a new online publication that has been created, designed, and edited by Matthew T. Marco, a good friend of mine: The Never-Ending Noodle. It’s a food blog, sort of. Rather than focusing on recipes and reviews — though it may eventually come to contain things like that — it’s site that features interesting writing for food people by food people. From Matt’s publisher’s note:

Ultimately, I founded this periodical on this concept, to refract our lives’ experiences through a prism of culinary metaphor, because it’s a metaphor that is very nearly universal. The first three articles here are a start in that direction, the primi piatti of a feast of verbage that deeply investigates the relationships between palettes and personalities, between cultures and comestibles.

I have written one of these inaugural articles: “It Ain’t Easy Being Green: Memoirs of a Veggie Cowgirl”. It’s an account of the ass-backwards way in which I became a vegetarian, and it features a snappier writing style than I generally get to use here when talking about weighty literary matters. To whet your appetite, the first paragraph:

I became a vegetarian reluctantly. My two best friends in high school were vegetarians, so for years I had no choice but to champion the life of the carnivore. While Kate and Jessica wrinkled their pretty noses, I was the girl going out with the boys for all-you-can-eat ribs at Big Ed’s Barbecue. I believed in the food chain, meat was delicious, but also—and not unimportantly—eating meat marked me as a different kind of girl, one who made dirty jokes and drank hard liquor and just might be talked into a ride on the mechanical bull in the back corner of Big Ed’s.

It’s about ethics, it’s about gender, it’s about food snobbery, and I like to think it’s a pretty good time. Matt has written an article on metaphor and noodles and new beginnings, and Nikhil Moturi rounds out the first issue with an article on the role of Dosas in his transition to a new life on the other side of the country. I recommend both of them highly. And if you, too, are a person with a deep and personal relationship to food, we are looking for new writers and would love to have you on board.

“And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
looking at everything and never from!
It floods us. We arrange it. It decays.
We arrange it again, and we decay.

— Rainer Marie Rilke, from the Eighth Duino Elegy

Something has been troubling me in all this talk of ecstatic self-forgetting. In order to make Bataille and Weil play nice with each other, I had to sand off some of their rough edges. In particular, I had to paint both Bataille’s abandon and Weil’s obedience as essentially mental states; in the foregoing post, these writers resemble nothing so much as a Buddhist monk and nun who, in their quite distinct ways, are striving to quiet the chatter of conscious thought and to replace it with the profound silence of the sacred. As a Buddhist sympathizer, I respect a lot of things about Weil’s ethics of attention, but the weakest link in her chain is the way that attention translates into action — all she can say is that “the actions that follow [attention] will be automatic.” There is a troubling refusal of responsibility here that seems to have to do with Weil’s discomfort in her own embodiedness; we have already seen, in my post on Weilian self-sacrifice, the fierceness with which she deprives herself of necessities in the name of ethics, but her wish to be “decreated” is more profound than a wish for death — it is a wish, as her term suggests, to undo her own creation. She writes, “When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.” She wishes, in short, to not have a body, and this creates a problem in terms of engaging with the physical world — her efforts at ethical action, as outlined in that earlier post, are often bizarre, unsuccessful, and misunderstood. Ultimately they are fatal. (Though they retain, as I argued, a symbolic value.)

In Bataille, the disconnect between mind/soul and body is just as profound, but since he values the body and not the soul, we encounter Weil’s difficulty reversed, as in a mirror: the blind spot in his thinking is how to get from action to attention, from ecstatic bodily practice to reflective morality. Bataille is not even really interested in reflective morality; the closest he comes is to argue for the continual overthrow of moral systems in favor of a continual quest for the authentically contradictory promptings of the deepest self. My problem with this is not so much that this ‘deepest self’ disappears into the bodily (though it could be said that this is another escape from responsibility), but rather with the particular way in which Bataille mobilizes the category of the animal in order to describe the embodied aspects of personhood.

Last time, I described Bataille’s sense of humans as “discontinuous” beings, fundamentally alone in their heads. This is imagined, in Erotism and especially in Theory of Religion, in contrast to the “continuity,” the immanence and immediacy, of the animal world, for which he argues we have a deep nostalgia. We imagine that animals “exist in the world like water in water,” and we experience ourselves as lacking this feeling: “Man is the being that has lost, and even rejected, that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy.” Bataille’s pursuit of the experience of sovereignty is the quest to “lose his head” and give himself over to the animal within.

This account of the animal world resonates with us because it does sound true, it does recall a feeling we can empathize with. Animals are frequently evoked, in literature and film, as figures of Edenic innocence or of blind necessity — and either way, we see in their unselfconsciousness a state we envy. Rilke, in the poem excerpted in the epigraph, describes this nostalgia: “All other creatures look into the Open / with their whole eyes. But our eyes, / turned inward, are set all around it like snares.” The problem, as in Bataille, is self-consciousness; if only we could rid ourselves of it, we could exist “in that pure space . . . in which flowers endlessly open,” we could reside in “Nowhere without No.”

Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal follows Heidegger in exposing this imagined nostalgia as an utter fabrication. Where Rilke and Bataille see the animal’s experience as one of glorious harmony with its surroundings, Agamben and Heidegger see it as one of blindness and incomprehension. Agamben cites zoologist Jakob von Uexküll on the experience of the tick, who is blind, deaf, and ultimately responsive to only three things: the smell of butyric acid, contained in the sweat of all mammals, which causes her to abandon her post and fall blindly downward; the temperature of 37 degrees centigrade, which indicates that she has in fact fallen on a mammal; and the typology of mammal skin, which she navigates in order to find the least hairy spot from which to suck her meal.

The animal is, in Heidegger’s terms, “captivated” by those few phenomena that trigger its behaviors. He explains that a stone is “worldless,” while an animal is “poor in world” — it is open to certain specific phenomena, but it cannot recognize them as such. The tick has no knowledge of the dog, or its sweat, or butyric acid; it just responds automatically to a signal. The problem is that we don’t want to think of animals as mechanisms; waterfalls obey the laws of physics, but animals behave, even if they cannot act. Heidegger calls them “poor in world” to indicate the degree to which we humans project ourselves onto them; rather than seeing, as Bataille does, humanity as constituted by a lack of animal immediacy, Heidegger reverses the terms. We can think of animals, he argues, only in terms of a subtraction from ourselves: animals lack the uniquely human understanding of beings as beings.

The temptation to romanticize this lack is great. Agamben writes, “The tick is immediately united to these three elements in an intense and passionate relationship the likes of which we might never find in the relations that bind man to his apparently much richer world. The tick is this relationship; she lives only in and for it.” But is being a relationship the same thing as having a passionate relationship? The answer is an unequivocal “no,” and this is what Bataillean romanticizations of the animal obscure. When we speak of “animal passion,” we anthropomorphize the animal; for passion to be involved, there must first be a recognition of subject and object, which puts us squarely in the realm of the human.

At times, Bataille acknowledges this. Near the beginning of Theory of Religion, he admits that there is a “sticky temptation of poetry” about the animal, because “In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own.” Annie Dillard, in an essay called “Living Like Weasels,” succumbs to precisely this temptation: she valorizes the weasel’s instinct to bite and hold, offering an image of an eagle shot out of the sky with a weasel skull attached to its neck. The weasel, attacked by the eagle, must have fought back and almost won, and its corpse must have dangled from the eagle for weeks. Dillard, of course, turns this grim scenario into a moral imperative:

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

This is a beautiful metaphor for passion, but it cannot be said that the weasel feels passion. The danger here is that we believe these metaphors, and they trick us into facile ways of thinking about our own relationship to the animal part of us: our bodies. Bataille seeks, in his mystical practice, to liberate himself from conscious thought and obey his animal instincts, but this is never in fact possible. Agamben puts it this way: “While mystical knowledge is essentially the experience of a nonknowledge and of a concealment as such, the animal cannot comport itself toward the not open.” In other words, an animal doesn’t know that it doesn’t know itself, whereas a human can never quite escape her self-awareness. The terms of the comparison are always ours, because the animal doesn’t have terms.

Timothy Treadwell, subject of the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, provides a vivid example of one way this mistake can be fatal. He spent thirteen summers in remotest Alaska, living with and filming grizzly bears, until inevitably he was killed and eaten by them. This is not a spoiler; it’s revealed in the first three minutes of the movie and is plastered all over the preview — in fact, Treadwell’s death is what makes this a film worth watching and not just another nature show. Treadwell loves the bears; he names them all, he pets them, he mourns their deaths, and at several different points in the film he works himself into a frenzy about trappers and poachers and the encroachment of civilization: “I’m in love with my animal friends. I’m in love with my animal friends! In love with my animal friends. I’m very, very troubled. It’s very emotional. It’s probably not cool even looking like this. I’m so in love with them, and they’re so f-ed over, which so sucks.”

He is sympathetic because of his passion. It is animal passion, in the mistaken sense evoked by the passage from Dillard — the bears are Treadwell’s one necessity, and he is holding onto them even though they might be his death. In fact, it often seems that he devotes himself to the bears because they might be his death. One of the people interviewed in the film is a woman whose house in Kodiak, Alaska was always the last place Treadwell stayed when he was on his way out into the wilderness; she reports that every year, as he would set out, he would tell her that if he didn’t come back, she shouldn’t be sad, because he had died doing what he loved.

But the bears, as director Werner Herzog reminds us, cannot love him back:

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.

The problem with romanticization of the animal is that it does not allow us to see the radical closedness of the animal. People like Treadwell, Dillard, Rilke, and Bataille fancy that they are getting in touch with something “primal,” originary, and authentic within the human when they embrace their “animal” passions, but in fact, this is a profound rejection of what is most animal-like within us. The animal is that which does not know itself; it is the truly unknowable, blindly biological forces that, terrifyingly, motivate us at the core.

The problem I have with both Weil and Bataille, then, is that whether you value the mind over the body or the body over the mind, you are still failing to deal adequately with the dual, always contradictory nature of the human. Treadwell becomes a reverse Ahab, proving that to embrace the animal is just as fatal as to reject it.

The last time I wrote about Simone Weil, I talked about her drive to self-effacement in terms of an ethics of attention. In this post, which is a condensation of material from my recent paper, I will talk about self-effacement as, paradoxically, a drive for authenticity. Georges Bataille is a veritable prophet of authenticity, seeking to live the vicissitudes of his id to their fullest, whereas Weil is fiercely obedient to the commands of God. These, I will argue, are actually quite similar practices — both mystics strive to be true to impulses within themselves that are, at the same time, perceived to be in excess of those selves. What I aim to uncover here is the way in which recognizing the otherness of ourselves provides a necessary counterpoint to the ethics of attention, which requires us to recognize others as ourselves.

The basic idea behind Weil’s ethics of attention, as I explained last time, is that affliction deprives people of their humanity and attention has the power to restore it. I demonstrated this through Weil’s thoughts on the parable of the good Samaritan; before he was paid attention to, the beaten man was just a pile of flesh and rags by the side of the road. Bataille also believes that the worst thing that can happen to a person is to be reduced to “thinghood” by the pressure of outside forces — the prime example of this is slavery, but lest we think that this problem ended with abolition, Bataille reminds us that in modern capitalist society, all human beings are required to be materially productive and thus we are all reduced to thinghood (see The Accursed Share, vol. 1). The way to restore humanity is to embrace uselessness in order to remove oneself from the chain of production — in Bataille’s mystical practice, a person restores herself to humanity through an experience of the self as sovereign.

In Blue of Noon, the character Dirty (short for “Dorothea”) stands for the sovereign orgy of expenditure. When the book opens, she is “utterly” drunk in a London dive bar, “the most squalid of unlikely places,” and wearing “a sumptuous evening gown.” The implied class status makes her debauchery more complete; for a woman “so rich . . . [that] she could spit in other people’s faces” to have arrived at a condition and a place like this, she must be squandering resources in earnest. Dirty and Troppmann (the protagonist) “managed, with no respect for conventional pigeonholes, to eliminate every possible urge, in the room at the Savoy as well as in the dive, wherever [they] had to.”

The experience of sovereignty that accompanies the breaking of taboos has a double source, according to Bataille (see Erotism: Death and Sensuality). Immediately apparent is the sensation of freedom that comes from transgressing a rule; one obeys only oneself, and feels that one’s desires are no longer in check. Alexander Irwin (in Saints of the Impossible) reads in this experience the potential groundwork for a politics: “The inner experience of freedom remains the precondition of any meaningful deployment of freedom in the public, political world.” But Troppmann is profoundly conflicted; he is enthralled by Dirty but impotent in bed with her. He longs to “lose his head” and give himself over to passion, but he cannot; he admires the candor of Dirty’s utter debauch, but witnessing it makes him “distraught with anxiety” almost to the point of weeping. This reflects Bataille’s theory that transgression “suspends a taboo without suppressing it.” From the suspension of the taboo comes a dizzying rush of freedom, but the prohibition itself remains, producing an anguished state of inner conflict. This anguish is the second source of the experience of sovereignty that accompanies transgression, more hidden and more powerful than the naïve sensation of freedom. Breaking rules would be trivial if we did not feel bound by them; in doing so, one exposes oneself to a lacerating experience of self-contradiction that threatens the unity of one’s selfhood, insofar as it is a unity, with annihilation: “Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him.” Rather than simply reveling in the freedom to pursue his own desires and thus being inspired to work toward freeing others to do the same, the practitioner of Bataille’s philosophy is led to suffer the anguish of realizing that his own desires are deeply contradictory. What are the political possibilities of this anguish? Bataille does not pursue them in depth, but we can begin to see them by putting him in conversation with Weil.

Troppmann and Dirty strive to “lose their heads” by “eliminat[ing] every possible urge”—that is, in their debaucheries they seek to transcend their rational, unified selves by allowing their irrational, fragementary desires to take over. Troppmann’s boorishness and cruelty are at least partly the result of a deep concern for authenticity: “I would have liked to give her a real kiss, but I felt myself verging on insincerity. I left immediately.” It makes perfect sense that a Bataillean profligate would place such value on being true to himself; the experience of sovereignty seems to entail a radical trueness to self that goes beyond all fictions of unified desire.

Curiously, Weil’s self-emptying attention also entails a concern for authenticity. Born a Jew and raised an agnostic, Weil experienced a Christian awakening in 1937 following a stint of factory labor wherein she realized that “Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves” (see Waiting for God). Her conversion experience was one of being subject to a strong external force; in a chapel at Assisi, she writes, “something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.” The perceived externality of this force is what convinces her of its reality, and similar mystical experiences will continue to fuel her religious belief. However, she is adamant in refusing baptism because she has not experienced a similar kind of compulsion with regard to it. She explains, in a letter to Father Joseph Perrin, that she has resolved to stop wrestling with the question and plans to simply wait for God’s command:

It is very possible that after having passed weeks, months, or years without thinking about it all, one day I shall suddenly feel an irresistible impulse to ask suddenly and immediately for baptism and I shall run to ask for it. For the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent. It may also be that my life will come to an end before I have ever felt this impulse.

Bataille would applaud the decision to take the promptings of “irresistible impulse” so seriously, but for him impulse originates in surging internal desire whereas Weil waits for something she can attribute to an external source. This points up what I see as the crux of the difference between Bataille’s and Weil’s thought: it’s not that she believes in God and he is an atheist (for the God that she believes in is quite absent from the world), it’s not that she advocates “good” and he advocates “evil” (for these categories are slippery, as will be discussed in more detail below), and it’s not even that she sees an orderly universe where he sees a disorderly one (though this is true). In terms of their ethical thought, all these concerns are secondary to and derive their importance from the fundamental situation of the subject: Bataille’s is profoundly isolated while Weil’s is profoundly open.

The experience of sovereignty, which Irwin reads as “the basis for an effective resistance to political tyranny,” is a self-enclosed experience, “an experience of the self as sacred.” In Erotism, Bataille explains that humans are “discontinuous” beings, which is more or less to say that we are alone in our heads:

Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.

This creates a profound sense of loss, Bataille theorizes, wherein we yearn for the imagined continuity that links everything outside of us; we long to “exist in the world like a wave lost among many other waves.” This sense of loss is what motivates human endeavors such as love, religion, and violence, none of which in its ordinary form can ever really heal over this imagined loss. Death is imagined as a return to continuity, but actual death does not allow its subject to continue to exist and reap the benefits — so Bataille’s mystical practice aims instead at the shattering of the subject, which is a kind of death-while-still-conscious. Eroticism is the name he gives to his mystical practice in this particular book, and he names three varieties: physical, emotional, and religious. Troppmann and Dirty engage at the physical level, wherein the transgressing of taboos and the unselfconsciousness of orgasm offer “little deaths” and the experience of sovereignty described above. The emotional level is tied to romantic love, wherein one can imagine oneself dissolving into one’s beloved. Both of these practices do involve the participation of another person, but the experience of the subject as Bataille conceives it is profoundly isolated; the importance of the encounter with the other lies in the trauma it inflicts on the self, trauma that can cause the desired shattering. In the third level, that of religious mysticism, the other is no longer necessary at all and the required trauma is internalized, imagined through meditation.

Faced with the same gulf between human beings, Weil turns not inward but outward. Bataille seems to conclude that, since inner experience is the only kind available, the best one can do is to cultivate that experience to its extremes. Weil, on the other hand, finds her inner experience boring and trivial, choosing instead to focus on the challenge presented by the unknowable outside world. In her ethical practice, this takes the form of attention to the suffering other; in her religious practice, it takes the form of attention to God.

Bataille seeks sovereignty; Weil seeks abdication. Both seek to liberate us from unexamined, fictively unified notions of self, and this has important ethical consequences. Peter Connor (in Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin) calls our attention to an exchange between Bataille and Sartre that took place in March of 1944, in which Sartre points out that Bataille’s valorization of “evil” seems less like a rejection of moral systems than like an alternative moral system. Bataille responds by explaining that, in the overturning of “good” morality by “evil” morality, what is really important is the overturning itself. The process he is describing is not one of abandoning the search for morality, but rather one of an infinite search that seems to have something in common with Weil’s infinite wait for the commands of her absent God. Connor explains that for Bataille,

There is no moral of the story. Ethics does not consist in acquiring knowledge of some thing that can be communicated through a text. This was Kant’s error. Rather, it lies in the infinite inquiry into how communication is possible in general. The movement toward ethics is a movement away from knowledge.

Weil’s faculty of attention also depends crucially on the movement away from knowledge, which would lead one to draw hasty conclusions rather than waiting patiently the truth. But in a world where God is absent and other people are, at bottom, unknowable, must we wait forever?

Weil reflects that “to love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.” Her choice of the word “stranger” instead of the more common Biblical “neighbor” reflects the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan as well as the thrust of her own ethics of attention, which involves taking on another’s suffering. But the reversal is intriguing, and this is where Bataille can help: ethics cannot be about self-denial alone. The love that motivates it must be universal, and this means that in addition to loving others, we must embrace our flawed, contradictory, selfish selves.