A Loving Rage
Simone Weil, will you show me the way?
Disclaimer: This is not a poem, and it’s not an essay. It seems to be some sort of mad girl letter, or half-baked manifesto. Whatever this chaotic piece is, it feels like the beginning of a long relationship with the title, “A Loving Rage.”
Oh, age, when will you finally soften me?
I am baking in the pressure cooker of my late 20s, when all one’s expectations have finally hard-boiled. I’ve heard similar rumblings from my peers, too. The flames of anger lick our faces, or the ghosts of a small, numbing sadness begin their routine haunts. Are you afflicted with these responses? How have the thoughts, those ones about the way your life should go, fermented? Your great moment of becoming has come and gone. This is when it is all to culminate—career, marriage, family—pressed like sardines into a short span of unforgiving years, begging to be spread out evenly over toast.
And what about the world around you? At the start of your Roaring 20s, causes were the bright flares that lit your way. You could strive with resolve, you could give yourself away, consumed by holy discontents and a clear-eyed vision of a renewed world. The economy, international women’s rights, the education system, the cultural narratives, the government policies, the family structure—all cracking and crying out to be mended by your young and willing mind. Heart pounding and hands hotly clutching your scythe, you bring in the ripe harvest of justice.
But when your thirties gradually approach, you’re meant to lay these ideals down, serving their burnt edges on the silver platter of a certain realism. This particular enlightenment is supposed to finally endow you with the robust rationale of the world—of property taxes, of school zones, of the air-tight privacy of the nuclear family. Finally, you have come to grasp the decisive logic of convention, after your revolutionary years of trying to overthrow it.
You laugh at the idealism, naivety, and the misplaced vanity of your youth. It becomes no longer interesting to critique materialism or homogeneity—these angsts were merely trends, now neatly named and dismantled. You put the boisterous conversations about ideas behind you, now it’s time to relax and be entertained. It’s time to discuss merely the personal, the insular, the hobbies, and the continual life upgrades. These changes ripple through you, like a sweet and slow rot, hollowing out your molten core until achieving their smug self-actualisation.
But who sold you this new ontology? Reality is not actually the pristine control you’ve exercised over your manicured or automated life. It is unpredictable, fleshy, dotted with stabbing disappointments, untidy questions, and people in unspeakable pain. It is, in fact, ever in need of great repair.
I have begun to concede to the creeping mirages. I am growing angry, doubling down to resist their grip. I confess that I am prickly edges and a contrarian spirit. I speak in hyperbolic venom. But I refuse to take this ’50s housewife drug, dulling the aches created by our very own decadence. Like a mangy prophet, I stammeringly rage about the unloving state of society, still, and about the cruel and rising gods of efficiency. But I lack the divine direction of an Elijah, or the virtue of my mother. Pride lingers suspiciously in the bushes. Hypocrisy does as well. Which is more deadly—the poison of apathy I’m trying to fight, or that of the fury within?
Can I soften without laying down the Great Tasks? Can I offer up this intensity, baptised in kenosis, to emerge into a kind of gentle productivity? Can this fervour be transfigured into something sweet, which I can carry through a lifetime of mundane beauties? Can I keep the furniture of the radical, but refurbish it with forbearance? And could I even grow a pair of glistening, charitable eyes?
Can I come instead, into a loving rage?
Oh, Simone Weil—mystic, writer, activist, philosopher.1 I need you. Illuminate this path through your searing words, with your fanatical nature, alchemized and melted by Love. And yet your fires, preserved.
“I was alone. It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”
“It is true that we have to love our neighbor, but, in the example that Christ gave as an illustration of this commandment, the neighbor is a being of whom nothing is known, lying naked, bleeding, and unconscious on the road. It is a question of completely anonymous, and for that reason, completely universal love.”
“There is only one time when I really know nothing of this certitude any longer. It is when I am in contact with the affliction of other people, those who are indifferent or unknown to me as much as the others, perhaps even more, including those of the most remote ages of antiquity. This contact causes me such atrocious pain and so utterly rends my soul that as a result the love of God becomes almost impossible for me for a while. It would take very little more to make me say impossible. So much so that I am uneasy about myself. I reassure myself a little by remembering that Christ wept on foreseeing the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem.”
“The suffering all over the world obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties, and the only way I can revive and release myself from the obsession is by getting for myself a large share of danger and hardship.”
“There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition required to be fulfilled.”
“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is above all that is sacred in every human being.”
“The only thing left to hope for is the grace not to be disobedient here below. The rest is the affair of God alone and does not concern us.”
Drinking in all the oddities and beauties around me.
Warmly,
Carolyn Morris-Collier
Thanks for sharing all this Carolyn. Also approaching 30 and much of this resonates, including the anger which is as much internal as external.
Will have to read more Simone Weil!
Weil will guide us!