Simone Weil and the "self"

Alright, I did not intend to pick up Gravity and Grace when I was kept awake by a mighty heartburn from hell last night. "How to raise a happy baby" was more like what I was after. But right now all of my twenty seven baby books are in Durham and I'm in Alsace.

The books I've got left at my mum's are so dense that I never even fancied taking them to Durham to try and read them. Gravity and Grace is sitting right on top of Bonheoffer's impossibly dense Ethik (in the original German, which is so freaking dense that even my German friends read the English translation first). So anyway, 3am on a Thursday and a raging heartburn was a good a set of conditions as any to revisit my love-hate relationship with Simone Weil's oeuvre. The notes I scribbled in the book tell it all, ranging from "pure unadulterated genius!" to "you f***ing sicko".

I'm convinced that I'm not doing justice to her chapter on "self" and superimposing some thoughts of my own, so I do recommend getting the original text if you can. I'd love to link to the full text but I can't find it online. It's a short text which not disappoint those Christians who find themselves dwelling in the absence of God more often than they would want to.

Right at the begining of the book, Weil asks a fantastic question: "How come people never seem to have nearly enough energy to do the right spiritual things but have plenty of energy for immediate self-seeking priorities"? The former energy she calls "grace", while the latter is "gravity". The objective: more grace, less gravity. That is bound to get me interested.

Her chapter on "self" turns out to be suprisingly practical (or maybe it's just my reading of it). Weil posits that all human start out with quite a high level of "self" which in itself is neither really good nor really bad. The self can be -externally- destroyed by evil (she's thinking war crimes and extreme exploitation and alienation) or the self can be -internally- given to God by the creature. Because of her first hand experience of the Spanish Civil War, she has plenty of experience of the total collapse of the selves of people who have suffered intensely under evil powers and also a fair deal of experience of the ineptitude of those ideqlistic types who would have liked to "help" them.

She reckons that there are stages in the -external- destroying of selves by evil powers:

1. At the first stage, individuals suffer intensely from the humiliation and feels extreme revolt "like a fighting animal".

2. At the second stage, when the self is "half dead", it can be woken up by pure love. And yet the experience is incredibly painful for the individual who frequently lashes back at the dogooder. At this point she says it is our duty to absorb some of the anger.

3. In most extreme cases the self has been fully killed by evil forces. The person enjoys receiving streams of love and attention from a variety of sources but s/he is not nourished by it and does not fully re-emerges.

On the other hand, she reckons that your "self" is the only offering you can ever give to God.

When you do, some of the space formerly occupied by your "self" is occupied by the presence of God, which alone has the resources of love which does not harm. Bit by bit the presence of God (in what was formerly you) can at times restore the selves that have been destroyed. It's a bit like St Paul saying that he does not live any more, but Christ lives in him, although Weil herself does not use this specific example.

But that's not easy to do, and surrendering your "self" is not something you can do in five minutes, or in five years either. You can kid yourself that you did, but that has the potential to make you dangerous if you engage with people who are vulnerable. Weil cautions against the danger of love that isn't pure love.

Weil says that this offering of your self to God takes supplication. Now if you supplicate a human being, she says, you are trying to make them see things like you do so they will change their mind. But suplicating God involves forgetting about yourself and what you think and begging God to "rewire" you so you can see and operate in God's way and God changes you. [And in my opinion that can take a hell of a lot of time].

I'm going to leave this post here for now. The stuff I'd like to write about next, while directly related, is not found in Weil's material but in other things I've got from various sources. So it seems fairer to start another post later. I haven't fully digested the chapter yet, and there are some ideas I'm not entirely comfortable with but I can't pinpoint why. Mostly to do with my unconditional allegiance to Carl Rogers I suspect. Weil is way too pessimistic.

On baby clothes and trash bags...

Part 1

I just met a woman who was storing her baby stuff in trash bags in the dampest part of her attic right before the birth of her daughter. She did not have a nappy in the house. When she was almost due, her partner went to the attic and retrieved a couple of vests which they washed and stuffed in the maternity bag at the last minute.

What this woman and I have in common, besides storing our baby stuff in trash bags, is that we both lost our first pregnancies. Not the current one in case you wonder, but the one that came before that...

H. and I actually fell pregnant on our honeymoon a few days after the wedding. We did not expect things to work out so quickly but they did. H. was completely shocked and stared at the thin blue line for ages. Then he suggested praying, and that thought in particular still hurts like hell each time I think of it.

Now H. and I are both pretty jaded Christians who don't believe in miracles. Or who stopped believing in them early on as we were confronted with realities that called for miracles. They did not happen and God seemed to not give a monkeys. So we deduced that God does not work like that. On the scale of providence theology, we're as far removed from faith healing woodoo as you can get.

Also, prayer-wise we're pretty formal catholic types. Somehow we benefit from liturgy more than what we can come up with "off the cuff". But that evening it all changed. H. was so delirious with joy that he wanted to kneel down and pray straight away, something I've never seen him do at any other time before that time or since.

Soon enough, we were the type of expectant parents who don't store baby stuff in trash bags. We had a moses basket and a teddy bear, and like most first time parents we spent hours upon hours talking about our "little alien". I got lots of books and started keeping a journal.

Part 2

Then one day I started bleeding a bit, and then more and we ended up in A&E. To cut a long story short, I ended up losing the baby on my own at 1am in a dimly lit hospital room. I pretty much discharched myself and physically ran away from the bloody place a few seconds after they'd finally taken off the catether they'd put into my arms at about 8 in the morning.

I was a mess for about a week afterwards, thinking that I was doing the right thing by grieving as much as I could and "getting it all out". We deliberately ignored medical recommendations regarding when you can start again, and about three weeks later, my period was late.

But there was no home-test kit this time around. At some point I told H. that I thought we were back on and all he said was "mmm, let's wait".

But we were back on. My period was one and a half month late and it was time to start getting some antenatal care. So a few days before I was supposed to see a midwife for the first time (around week seven) I did a cheap test, which was very clearly positive. I held on for it for a few days and then tossed it in the bin.

I found it easier to assume that I would lose this pregancy too. I convinced myself that there was something wrong with me and that this one would go bad as well. Like everyone I've met who suffered a miscarriage, I was only interested in "beating" the date at which I had lost the first pregnancy.

No sweet baby talk this time around, no cute name, no stroking my tummy, no journaling, no baby shopping, no nothing...

Then my midwife decided I needed a dating scan because she could not calculate a due date given that there had been no period. At eight weeks, we got to see a healthy little punter happily kicking about on screen. H. asked if we should wait until 12 weeks to tell people, but the sonographer reckoned that this one looked like a stayer and that we could tell our families and friends straight away.

All were massively thrilled for us, especially the few who knew about the miscarriage. So I piggybacked on their enthusiasm and started trying to get into things a little bit.

Part 3

But I could never find the quiet trust and giddy excitement I had experienced the first time around. I had no desire to daydream about what the future held, I opened pregnancy books only when I needed some specific information, and found that I could not "talk" to my growing baby as I had before, even after I could feel it move.

I was getting worried about how detached I was. Every time I felt like enjoying the pregnancy something in me felt stuck. I was still happy at all the milestones. I started talking about "the baby" a little bit more, but that was it.

I'd read in a church bulletin that a service of rememberance and thanksgiving for babies who have died before or around the time of birth was being held by the hospital chaplaincy. I hated to think of my 5 cm long "little alien" being unsupported by its own parents so I went to it. I was surprised to see how I ended up needing my whole stash of tissues within the first 5 minutes.

And yet I soon had to forget about myself and try to tune in to the other participants a little bit. I noticed a couple of starrs aimed at my middle-sized bump. I really did not mean to hurt anybody else, to parade my bumb about or to be a voyeur, although I readily admit that I might have wanted to feel that I was not alone in this.

Refreshments were offered after the service and an old lady ushered me to a table with three other women who seemed to be a little bit less upset than the rest. It turns out that they have been coming every year since 2005 or 2007 and that their loss was less recent.

I shared that I did not know why I was still so upset, since I fell pregnant again right away and everything's been going perfectly fine with this pregnancy.

That is when the other woman told me about the baby things she initally stored in her damp attic. It struck me that my own baby things are currently stored out of sight in trashy supermarket bags under the desk and not lovingly folded away in a wooden piece of furniture.

And curiously, I found that while I had nothing to "say" to the baby growing inside me, I had lots and lots to say to the deceased little alien. There were unstopable streams of affect flowing in that direction. I felt that I could talk to it for days. This is precisely what I'm not able to do with the new baby.

So I don't know where this is going. I'm hoping that I'll work through this to find a fondness for the baby whose mother I will soon be. I make myself look at pictures of newborns, thinking that there's every chance that I'll soon be the mother of a screaming live baby, not an incredibly fragile-looking dead embryo.

The other woman said she was really quick to get her stuff out of the trash bags, wash it all up a couple of times and decorate the nusery when her daughter was with her. I'm hoping I don't have to wait quite that long to feel less hurt and less terror. But I'll never again enjoy an innocently happy pregnancy.

The baby is kicking right now, by the way...