rereading Simone

as some of us are starting to

Rereading Simone Weil, as before I realize the utter disparity between the urgent relevance of what she has to say (for us, today), with the instant misunderstandings produced by her choice of God-language to deliver it in. On the one hand, she might have expected us to heed all her warnings about the Great Beast, or even Churchianity; on the other, we have every right to expect someone who has thought so much about the misuse of language, & who strives at every moment to get it right, to not confuse us.  Was there really no other way to say those things?

Now, I cannot make her, eighty years back, see all the mischief that Foxwing politics has committed upon--& with—the same God-language. And she knew not only the Inquisition that we still, sort of, remember: she had the Albigensians in sight, almost continually. I think at this time, too, of G K Chesterton, who perhaps also retains much we could heed, but he had the good sense to cloak his insights in paradox & not apodeictic certainty. But he wasn’t autistic, & thus could more surely know for whom he wrote.

To talk of some of these things without God-language is sometimes like wanting to speak quantum physics without using math. Okay, I get that. It would have taken the same amount of brain-hours for another genius to translate them back, as she had to set them down, & she was racing the clock even to do that much. Secondly, her writings probably owe their continued existence to that same God-language. It may be, in short, quixotic to wish it otherwise.

I think, however, that we have arrived at a time when we can see through the long-esses & quaint spellings to the actual sense, for her present-day revivalists are hardly those wicked Bible-toters, not at all. And she will be found among the other tormented oracles we must perforce turn to, as the sky rains down its petitioned evil.

10-9-23