On Simone Weil

Simone Weil, the Jewish writer, mystic, and activist who converted to Catholicism and starved to death at the age of 33 by insisting she eat no more than the rations allotted to her countryman in Occupied France, is one of those polarizing figures who attract almost equal degrees of cult-like devotion and awe on the one hand, and barbed accusations of fuzzy-headed idealism and anti-Semitism on the other.

T.S. Eliot gave her a strong, if somewhat guarded, endorsement, noting that “a potential saint can be a very difficult person: I suspect that Simone Weil could be at times insupportable.” But he also thought her possessed of “a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Leslie Fiedler, Robert Coles, and Francine du Plessix Gray, among others, have been drawn to her work, while Albert Camus, perhaps moved by her efforts with De Gaulle for the French Resistance, called her "the only great spirit of our times.”

On the other hand, De Gaulle responded to her plan to parachute untrained women into France to serve as field nurses by saying "she's crazy."

Among her detractors, Kenneth Rexroth disparaged the political program advanced in The Need for Roots as “egregious nonsense,” accused her of a “sick kind of agonized frivolity,” and pointedly wondered if “she was ever aware of the smell of her own armpits.” Susan Sontag, in a somewhat similar vein, held her up as the exemplar of “an age that only believes in the reality of sickness,” finding in her “fanatical asceticism … and contempt for pleasure” a morbid and hysterical spiritual imagination. “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her,” she wrote. Yet she found something to admire in Weil all the same: “in the respect we pay to such lives we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world.”

That sense of mystery which Weil both projected and inhabited has compelled several prominent American women poets to write about her work. Stephanie Strickland’s Red Virgin is a sensitively rendered suite of lyrics that incorporate substantial details from her life to give us a vivid sense of her difficult and thorny personality and the cost of her struggle to articulate her astringent, uncompromising philosophy.

More recently Fanny Howe has written movingly about Weil’s life and work in prose poem pieces like “Doubt” (from Gone) and “Love and Work” from The Wedding Dress. Howe acknowledges Weil’s intransigence, her fierce, even quixotic, commitment to an austerity that bordered on annihilation. What draws Howe to Weil – what draws anyone who has found sustenance in her work – is her willingness to risk, her gnostic abandonment to abjection, an absolutist faith in negative theology bordering on the histrionic.

In Gravity and Grace, Weil writes: “God can only be present in the creation under the form of absence.” This apophatic posture, which recalls the self-erasing work of Edmond Jabés, can be found in many medieval mystics, as Anne Carson draws attention to in her own Weil-inspired work, Decreation, a book that is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, like so many of Carson’s works. Carson invokes the medieval mystic and martyr Marguerete Porete, whose radical treatise, The Mirror of Simple Souls, promoted union with God through the annihilation of the self, a theme that resonates with Weil’s mysticism. Porete was condemned by the Church as a heretic and burned at the stake.

Gravity is Weil’s term for matter, which she holds in contempt, rather as the Gnostics were alleged to have done, and very much like the Cathars, from what we know, who placed an inhuman bounty on the mortification of the flesh. Yet the final expression of her devotion was to deliberately starve herself to death in a British hospital, in protest of the meager rations allotted her countrymen under Nazi occupation. Hysterical? Or heroic?

Weil’s tactics sharply divide and unite both her detractors and her advocates. Her gift may really have been to blur such stodgy binaries, to overturn or undermine accepted categories for how spiritual commitment might mean, of what it might demands of us.

“The self,” Weil wrote, “is only a shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light.” Grace, then, becomes in her gnostic a-theophany, that which obliterates the self, thereby rendering it porous to the ultimate Other. As Carson observes, “like Marguerite Porete, she feels herself to be an obstacle to herself inwardly. The process of decreation is for her a dislodging of herself from a center where she cannot stay because staying there blocks God.”

Weil herself declares: “I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness.”

The will to self-abnegation, the invitation to the abyss of Unknowing, repelled Sontag, who was rightly frightened to gaze into it. So would anyone desirous of a normal, i.e. more repressed, life. Sontag was writing at the height of the neo-Freudian moment in America, when so much of the intellectual discourse was concerned with fomenting models of healthy interiority and combating the perceived plague of postwar neurosis. Weil’s extremism was simply too much for her. It’s too much for most people. But for some, it offers a way out – which is to say a way further in.

N.B. Weil’s attitude toward her own Judaism is just as extreme as her other beliefs. In her essay on The Iliad she writes scathingly of the Old Testament, condemning its idolatry and its representation of the deity as a figure of power rather than one of mercy and compassion. “Everything,” she writes, “is of a polluted atrocious character … beginning with Abraham, right down through all his descendants.” She does make some exceptions for the O.T.: The Song of Solomon, Job, The Psalms. Her contempt for the O.T. led her to feel close to Catholicism as Judith Thruman notes in her excellent essay on Weil in The New Yorker.

Speaking the Estranged -- book release

My book of reviews and essays, Speaking the Estranged, is now available from Asterism Books.

Speaking the Estranged

Published by the great team at Three Count Pour in Chicago (Ken Taylor, J. Peter Moore) it collects 30 years of work. Highlights include pieces on Michael Palmer, Jorie Graham, Raul Zurita, William Corbett, Norman Finkelstein, Mark Scroggins, Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Elizabeth Robinson, Peter Gizzi, and Nathaniel Mackey.

“All things/speak if they speak the estranged,” wrote George Oppen. The reviews gathered here represent thirty years of attention to a poetics of estrangement. For the most part I’ve sought to champion the work of poets who operate outside the well-policed boundaries of mainstream critical practice and as such might receive no attention at all. These reviews look mostly at small press poets working on the vital edge of the literary economy, who are committed to an aesthetic of restless and promiscuous invention. Their poetry is oblique, dissonant, and fractured; it both undermines and upholds traditional poetic imperatives, impatient with received notions of form. By and large these poets reject the naïve idea of the poem as a tidy report on subjective experience, focusing instead on the experience of language as such. To write a poetry of estrangement means recognizing that the world is broken and requires a broken kind of language to engage it. It means building small, lyric incursions – little negentropic engines – that create a difficult, disjointed beauty. Poetry is a language inside of language.

"You've marked out a kind of original canon (I'm delighted to be within its precincts) grounded in the world and in language yet sublime and mysterious and, in a way, none of the more mechanical disrupters of language conventions achieve. And of course, your sentences are as 'poetic' as the subjects you examine (reveal, even beyond themselves). A delight and a deep accomplishment."

Michael Heller

Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

N.B. from 2004 -- a response paper from my Holocaust Studies grad seminar

Is it possible for a novel about the Holocaust to be too beautiful? Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces is a kind of fantasia on the Holocaust, almost, one wants to say, a valentine to it, a tale so awash in richly lyrical prose that it seems more enamored of the gorgeous effects it produces than in articulating the historical depth of its troubling subject. Like many virtuoso turns, the book is drenched in a technique that all but strangles the pathos it aims for. The darkness of the Nazi terror and the ethical responsibility which it imposes on a writer is airbrushed to a self-serving burnished, lapidary glow, as if beautiful sentences alone were sufficient to counter the apocalypse.

The question at stake here is whether or not such writing constitutes an abuse of history. Probably not, since the writer’s motives seem sincere. On the other hand, sentimentalism abuses both literature and the reader. The unintended irony of the text within a text’s title, “Bearing False Witness,” seeps into and taints the entire novel. The deeper currents of the book, however, offer tantalizing, if intermittent, reflections on language and translation, memory and identity, and how the awful pressures history exerts warps and reshapes them. When not waxing nostalgic or merely self-indulgent, Michaels can be quite compelling on this point. As the protagonist Jakob observes early on, language has both the power to destroy and to restore. However, Michaels never focuses her heady prose on this theme in a sustained way and the result is that the novel comes off as precious, mannered, and attenuated, in love with the sound of its own voice.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the novel is the way it valorizes the idea of an earthy, primal Hellenic ur-world as the antidote to the terrors of the Holocaust. This return to a putative origin of the West, more chthonic than classical, is presented with a gushing and feckless transparence that verges on the deeply cynical. Michaels’ treatment of this theme calls to mind Derrida’s remarks, in his essay on Levinas (“Violence and Metaphysics”) that “we live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history” (153). Yet despite the novel’s provocative meditations on this Joycean dialectic of jewgreek/greekjew, the idea that ethics is best promulgated by the syntactical switch from “they” to “we” never receives a fully embodied or clarified treatment.

The play of historical tensions, represented most fully in the often seemingly capricious accumulation of cultural details like Athos’s reading interests, never amounts to more than an outline for a theme. The bricoleur method founders in the book’s prolonged dalliance with spectrality. Its real failure however is that the Holocaust is simply fodder for a lyrical brutalism that reduces it to a merely literary tragedy.

Hondo

In John Farrow’s 1953 film, Hondo, John Wayne’s character tries to explain to Gerldine Page how Native American language works. It’s a deeply Orphic account, one that recalls Walter Benjamin’s fascinating if somewhat convoluted discussion of language in his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and the Language of Man.”

“Language communicates the linguistic being of things … The answer to the question ‘What does language communicate?’ is therefore “’All language communicates itself.”

And: “Naming is that by which nothing beyond it is communicated, and in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language.”

Hondo explains it this way:

“Nestarte [the name of his dead wife] – you can’t say it except in Mescalero. Means morning. But that isn’t what it means either. Means more than just that. Indian words mean the sound and feel of a word. Like crack of dawn, first bronze light that makes the butte stand out against the great desert.”

A few words to my students about AI. And the fate of culture...

To my students. A few words about AI. And the fate of culture.

I will not be commenting on this first round of responses. I will say, however, that I’ve observed clear signs of students using AI to produce their responses. The same key phrases being used across multiple papers etc. This is dismaying. It makes me wonder why some of are you even enrolled in university or in my class. It makes me wonder why I even teach frankly.

AI has produced a crisis of faith for university lecturers, professors, deans, etc. No one knows how to respond – how to stem the tide. In my view, the tide cannot be stemmed. We have to figure out how to work with AI in a way that does not compromise academic integrity.

Integrity. Yes. The gold standard shibboleth that seems to have become debased. Or maybe just undergoing a sea-change.

I could go on about how using AI to write papers is disrespectful, not only of me, but of the entire idea of higher ed. I could say things like: You’re supposed to be learning how to think. To develop cognitive skills and engage in critical thinking.

I could chide you – like that would do anything. Beside no one likes being chided.

But maybe that’s not the thing here.

Many of you are committed to doing honest work and it shows. I’m grateful for it. Some of you are just looking for an easy work around, checking a box and moving on. You all seem to be bright and ambitious but are probably anxious about your futures. AI gives you a edge. Cuts you some slack. I get that. The future is a scary place.

Since I can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cheating is going on – since the very meaning of cheating seems to be shifting -- and since the university has declined to establish any standards in this matter -- I will not be doing anything about this.

The university, as usual, leads from behind – no one in Admin – the chairs, the deans, etc, will formulate a coherent policy for dealing with AI. Instead it falls on depts and individual instructors to deal with it. My program is meeting soon to discuss this issue. I don’t expect anything substantive to emerge from that. Just some vague consensus, the usual hand wringing and ineffective or laborious strategies.

I suppose this all comes down to some generational shift/fault line that I’m too antiquated to grasp. AI is just a tool, like any other tool, right? Why shouldn’t you use it? Your real focus is on Cell Biology or Law or whatever. You need every advantage you can get to succeed here. And I want you to succeed. But using AI may result in actually under preparing you for the job market.

The great linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky called ChatGPT a plagiarizing tool. Well, yes. So when one uses it one is not doing original work. Not doing the grunt work. The thing is: it’s ALL grunt work. That’s how you grow a brain. But maybe not anymore – not in the traditional way.

There are two registers here and they are in conflict: one is ethical. The prohibition against cheating. The other is technological: each new development or revolution in data processing and communications expands our reach and changes the meaning of what it means to be a baseline human. As someone who’s read SF since grade school, I get that and embrace it. The transformative potentialities of new tech – to expand our minds and our reach.

Maybe AI represents the emergence of some new hybrid form of intelligence. Something truly posthuman. It’s too early to tell and I am not smart enough to say. Uncharted waters.

The scholar Katherine Hayles writes about the interface/evolution of the human mind in her groundbreaking book: How We Became Posthuman (1999). In it she argues that humanity has always been posthuman, since the first use of tools – prosthetic extensions of the human sensorium. She charts the growth of cybernetics as a discipline at MIT and how ideas about feedback systems (how the output becomes the input etc) changes the very notion of our subjectivity.

New info tech always changes the game. Plato in the Phaedrus has a fable about how the invention of writing will have a deleterious effect on memory. When the printing press was invented it led to the Reformation and that led to the Thirty Years War. Sort of. The telegraph. Telephone. Radio. The internet. All of these dazzling forms of communication, by which time conquers space as Marx wrote, by which the world becomes ever more compressed – the On Time/next day delivery world. changed the game. This tech changed how we think about the meaning of being human.

As Hayles argues, consciousness can no longer be conceived of as centralized in one embodied location; it exists and flows in distributed networks. This is the underlying architectural concept of the internet.

Now comes AI. Is it a only a difference in degree? Or a difference in kind?

This is all by way of my trying to articulate what I consider to be the threat but also the promise of AI to the Humanities. End of the day I’m just a guy who writes about poetry. I’m punching above my weight here.

So pay this screed no heed. I’ve had too much coffee this morning and am just listening to the Brandenberg Concertos for like the 5000th time. They seem to hold up.

I know you are all trying to do your best and that you’re overburdened because college is hard – it’s supposed to be. So use AI all you want. I can’t stop you. I’m not sure I want to even. Anyway, the genie is out of the bottle.

And after all, this class is just a requirement. Another box to check. Another brick in the wall. In the big picture not all that important though Humanities profs like myself like to yammer on about rigor. And value. Which I do believe in.

But things are changing. One must adapt.

One thing that does not change? The brilliance of Hammett and Chandler. They do not suck. So enjoy.

Marty Supreme?

A high voltage manic picaresque, wonderfully kinetic, but utterly disjointed and very self-indulgent. Safdie thinks more is more. It is not. It’s like David Copperfield on crack. At 150 minutes a good 20 or 30 minutes far too long.

The first and third acts cohere – they pulse with a dynamic, compelling rhythm. But the film goes wildly off course in its effort to perpetuate that rhythm, to no evident larger scheme or purpose. Tthe interminably digressive shaggy dog second act is a shambling mess. The emotional core of the film is vacant. That is to say, there is no ironic perspective on Marty or his fate. This is no sentimental education: it’s just one damned thing after another. And no way for the viewer to empathize with the plight of the protagonist. The “happy” ending feels like a cheat. An offkey valentine begging for the viewer’s embrace, Um – yeah, no.

Safdie’s approach is derivative in all the wrong ways. He’s taken the flash and dazzle from the other Marty – the real Marty Supreme – aping the style of “Mean Streets” and “Goodfellas” but with none of the spirit of those films. There is no moral reckoning, in other words. The protagonist merely flails about until, voila! He’s a new father. The miracle of birth cliché is a “uh, wot?” moment: a limp pseudo-resolution. How could anyone imagine this self-involved twerp being transformed by fatherhood?

Still, Chalamet, in his most rat boy mode yet, delivers a whirling dervish of a performance. Oscar bound for sure I would think. Paltrow gives her ususal measured performance: it's smart, sexy, and subdued even if her romance with Marty is absurd and contrived. The show stealer is Odessa A’zion (what a fabulous name). She is real and powerful; almost she redeems the third act.

There are reversals and counter-reversals and counter-counter reversals and in the end none of it means a damned thing because Safdie is too busy showing off. In that sense, I guess it is like a ping-pong game.

A House of Dynamite

I went to a matinee screening at Amherst Cinema, where the screens are small but the vibe is good. Maybe 5 other people attending. I left the theater wrung out, emotionally exhausted, in a state of cognitive dissonance.

It seems clear to me that this was Bigelow’s intent (hereafter KB, an affectionate shorthand some of us who worked for her like to use). The tripartite story structure, which is not to be confused with the classic Hollywood 3-act nor, despite its shifts in POVs, with Rashomon, though it gestures toward the latter, is working toward something else altogether. The point is not to show how ambiguity besets differing perspectives or subjectivities, calling into doubt “the truth,” but how the most harrowing event imaginable plays out across a spectrum of experience and within the tight confines of a rigorous professionalism which is tested to the breaking point. It is also an ingenious method for ratcheting up suspense. A more vulgar person than myself might call it tease and denial.

The repetitions build up tension to an unbearable level, then – fade to black. Each break occurs just as the missile is about to hit Chicago. Their effect is, as a friend put it, “devastating.” They give you no solace, no room to hide, absolutely no comfort or closure. It put me in mind of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, which was meant to confound the audience’s expectations, to break them out of their complacency. The whole film seems like an extended exercise in that old rhetorical trope aposiopesis — when a narrative is suddenly broken off/disrupted, given no end.

Because it’s Bigelow it is of course expertly crafted. The pacing is superb. The close up work unnerving. The way she holds on the silences in various command centers as the realization sinks in that the missile cannot be stopped.

“This is insanity.” The President says (he’s not wrong) “No, Mr. President, this is reality.” A general replies (neither is he).

Always lauded for her dazzling action sequences, KB does not get enough attention or acclaim for the performances she draws from her cast. The first section places Rebecca Ferguson front and center. It’s a beautiful, restrained performance. There’s an anguished moment where she can barely hold back her tears as she thinks about her young son (whom we saw early on in a typical box-checking domestic scene).

And the little human moments — ballgame chat, lovers in a hurry, a mom on an outing with her son and yes, the hapless SecDef who can't accept the crushing weight of the catastrophe (including, it's suggested, his own personal failures) — all these splinters of humanity were powerfully affecting. Managing such a large number of actors in a coherent and compelling way, in such brief snippets, without slipping into disaster movie cliche, is an incredible accomplishment.

The always excellent Tracy Lett’s general lays out a concise range of scenarios as to the identity of the missile launcher, including one that involves a foreign power blinding one of our spy satellites before launching a missile – a more than plausible and frightening scenario.

Gabriel Basso dominates the second section, where he plays the Deputy NSA Jake Bearington. He’s an earnest Boy Scout type, pretty much the same character he played in “The Night Agent.” He’s a handsome hunk of beefcake but he is also quite good. His is the voice of moderation and de-escalation amid the chorus of brass hats who clamor for more bellicose responses to the maddeningly unidentified enemy. He plays noble frustration beautifully. Indeed, the film excels in its depiction of professionals performing difficult tasks under the most extreme pressure. The film is nothing if not Hawksian in that sense.

The final section brings us at last to Idris Elba’s POTUS—thus far only a voice. He is exhausted, a bit disheveled. Overwhelmed by the awfulness of the moment and the momentousness of the crucial decision he must make, he seems to crumble from within. It’s a wrenching, deeply human performance – he’s caught in an impossible moral crux. This section closes like the others. We don’t see the missile’s impact. POTUS is shuttled off to a bunker. We’re left to imagine the disaster, which is a brilliant move after so much build up. It puts the moral responsibility for imagining such an unthinkable event on the viewer. To have shown the missile strike would have robbed the film of its power, reducing it to just another inane spectacle of mass destruction, no better than an MCU film.

Above all, the film shows just how helpless we are in the face of our own awesome technologies. It’s not just the missiles that evoke horror, but the uselessness of the counter-measures.

One leaves the theater shaken, haunted. The Doomsday Clock is currently set at 89 seconds to midnight. And my students seem never to have heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.