The Needle's Eye Read online

  In 1945 he was the youngest vice-consul in the country and was set to sail to Egypt on a boat out of New York.

  Before he boarded ship, he went to a secondhand-book store on the Lower East Side and browsed. In the process he casually pulled a book off a shelf; it was written by Simone Weil. He took the book away to a restaurant, ordered beef, and sat in a paneled booth, exploring her thoughts as if he were diving into the sea. He said, “What I read was the truth. And I knew that I must devote my life to that, or it would all be meaningless.”

  The substantial part of the story, as he explained to me, was its impossibility: no work of Weil’s had been translated into English then.

  The book was, as it were, a slip in time.

  It fell out of the future into his hands. He could never find it again. No scholar of her work had ever seen a piece of writing by her that could have landed in a New York bookstore that year as far as he could tell.

  Morrissey asked and asked, attempting to explain the mystery.

  By now it has become an important part of his story, the story of his religious experience, his understanding of time and prophecy, mysticism and the hidden life in a world of objective fact.

  As it turns out, Mary McCarthy translated Weil’s great meditation on The Iliad and war in 1945, that same year. It was published in a periodical called Politics under an anagrammatic pseudonym, Emile Novis, that Weil used to hide from the Nazis.

  This may be why it was so hard to locate.

  It’s important to note that in some way the hermit was right, even though he was wrong.

  In 1944 George Oppen sailed by warship into the harbor at Marseille with the 103rd Division. In those days it would have taken two weeks to cross the Atlantic because of the mines planted by Germans many leagues deep in the sea. The ship would have had to pick its way across the waves. He and Weil missed passing each other on the sea.

  He arrived in Marseille two years after Weil had sailed out of it, heading first to Casablanca where she was one of nine hundred mostly Jewish refugees bundled onto floors, and then she boarded the Serpa Pinto, which docked in New York in July 1942. All the passengers were fleeing the occupation of the Nazis.

  She was writing an essay on pre- Christian beliefs. (She already held the radical position that Hinduism and ancient religions practiced Christianity more perfectly than the Church did.) She avoided people, as usual.

  On this journey she had to repeat to herself that being away from France would be temporary and involve her in some vital war effort made from New York. She was a French patriot and resistance fighter.

  Nonetheless, she said, “If we plan to do to the Germans what they did to us, we should be defeated.”

  There are many correspondences between Weil’s and Oppen’s thoughts, and on the surface we can identify certain common interests in Marx, Maritain, Heidegger, Trotsky, collectivity, trade unions, and the plight of factory workers. They shared a commitment to social justice and both were antibourgeois from bourgeois backgrounds.

  Both engaged with the historical moment in which they lived and let it take root with such a grip that their lives became expiations for the social wrongs being done around them. Weil felt that one must continually compensate for violence done to others.

  Both kept notebooks, but Oppen turned his notes into poetry, the other turned hers into essays on a variety of social and metaphysical questions.

  In his serial poem called Seascape: Needle’s Eye, abstract thoughts of his and hers converge: necessity, obedience, decreation, and the mystery of the sea.

  She sailed from Marseille in the summer and returned to England on a winter ocean, which is when she contracted tuberculosis. She was writing in her notebook all this time and coming closer to an experience of egolessness.

  She wrote: “The thing we believe to be our self is as ephemeral and automatic a product of external circumstances as the form of a sea wave.”

  I began these notes on Oppen and Weil in a clapboard seaside house on a rise once called Socialist Hill on Martha’s Vineyard.

  The house belonged to an artist, who was a Communist Party member, printmaker for the Federal Art Project of the WPA, and lithographer, involved with the Workers Film and Photo League.

  As a member of the Artists Union she made her greatest work during the thirties. Her house is now circled by SUVs coming from and going to the picturesque fishing village called Menemsha. There are some dress shops and antique stores and takeouts in ramshackle sheds.

  Her pictures had titles like Dock Workers, Miner’s Head, Soup Kitchen, Sweat Shop, Park Bench.

  Inside the house was a tattered collection of books, paintings, and photographs that represented a radical devotion to friendship, manual labor, and the arts.

  Now in this small wooden house, set among five others like it, stands the remnant of a neighborhood that was visited by refugees from Europe before and after the war. Trotsky stayed at the home of Max Eastman near this house on his way to Mexico.

  Trotsky wrote to a friend in 1936 that he had had long discussions with Simone Weil.

  “For a period of time,” he wrote, “she was more or less in sympathy with our cause but then she lost faith in the proletariat and in Marxism.”

  For many the loss of faith in communism was more crushing than the loss of religious belief. The ideologies were alike and it may have been this troublesome overlap that weakened them both at the center, so they intensified their activities left and right.

  Something else stirred Weil, when in the last year of her life, 1943, she wrote an essay on human personality, a concept she found impossible to isolate especially in a mass society. What could the value of one human person be among hordes of others? What would make a single individual matter in a vast and uprooted world? Why not silence or step on anyone who gets in your way?

  In Rossellini’s Europa ’51, the woman learns why.

  Like Simone Weil’s, her answer would be: “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…. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”

  For Weil, encouraged by her studies of Hinduism and the Greeks, only through the “existential renunciation of the ego” was it possible to discover this secret value that was sometimes called divine reality.

  This is what Oppen named “the bright light of shipwreck.” Oppen too was an analyst of the collective, and he too hammered away at an impersonal, ethereal, needle’s-eye view of the world as seen by a single individual.

  On the open water no other way

  To come here the outer

  Limit of the ego

  Weil sometimes wore a monk’s robe, and almost always she kept her body swaddled in cloaks.

  She was an automonastic without an order.

  She taught girls philosophy, worked in an automobile factory, joined the Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; like a child she traveled with her parents in Europe, had a mystical encounter with Christ in the church of St. Francis of Assisi, wrote for politically left newspapers and trade union journals, worked in vineyards in the south of France and for the Resistance.

  She is rarely included in academic courses in philosophy and social history. Instead she is an influence, a presence widely quoted but too elusive for scholars. Her unsystematic philosophy is rooted in her physical affliction, her blinding migraines, pleurisy, awkwardness, and, finally, tuberculosis. In Waiting for God, she speaks of “a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time.” Between the ages of twenty nine and thirty- four, when she died, she was seized by idea after idea, each of which she scribbled into her notebooks. She never mentioned her health or the weather.

  There is a legendary gate in Jerusalem called the Needle’s Eye where a camel had to be unloaded and kneel down in order to pass through its portal. Unburdening is the message of Christ in the parabl
e of the camel passing through a needle’s eye.

  “The Holy One said, open for me a door as big as a needle’s eye and I will open for you a door through which tents and camels may enter.”

  Remember how you lift the silver needle to the light to see all the way through the eye and out the other side. The eye is shaped like an eye.

  In Seascape: Needle’s Eye, Oppen writes and here is Weil being directly quoted:

  “… as if a nail whose wide head

  were time and space …”

  at the nail’s point the hammer- blow

  undiminished

  Oppen was taking notes on his readings of Weil when he was writing this set of poems. In a sense he was analyzing his own notes as if they were dreams, and discovering a surfeit of meaning behind his jotted images, in particular the needle’s eye as he juxtaposed it with the cosmic visions of Plotinus and the unconscious.

  “Even though I die,” she wrote, “the universe continues. That does not console me if I am anything other than the universe. If, however, the universe is, as it were, another body to my soul, my death ceases to have any more importance for me than that of a stranger. The same is true of my sufferings.”

  When she spoke of the nail standing in for time and space, she was referring to her migraines, which seemed to be crushed down from the universe and hammered into her brain. She felt in this way the weight of the universe as a great solid substance that we can hold up only by maintaining equilibrium in all our parts. She would see illness as a consent of the body to the invisible presence of the uncreated, and she chose starvation as a way to enter it.

  Though she could be seen as a philosopher of suicide, or even as the saint of suicide, she was known in person as funny, ironic, a compulsive talker, and very often kind.

  She lived a solitary life and for a time found happiness in picking grapes and sleeping in a hovel.

  Appropriately, her great work, her poetic work, was the unworked prose of her notebooks and her essays. War horrified her but she joined the antifascist Brigades in Spain. One day, seeing a child deliberately killed by a member of her own brigade, she renounced war for good and returned to her pacifist position. When a child is killed for someone else’s idea, the idea is finished.

  Lament alone still learns. Through night’s successions,

  she tallies, with girlish hands, our ancient vices.

  Suddenly, hesitant and awkard,

  she chooses a constellation among our voices

  and flings it, free of sorrow, heavenward.

  —Rilke, “Sonnet to Orpheus VIII,” trans. Robert Hunter

  Absence

  To see God is, in the end, to see nothing; it is to see nothing in particular; it is to participate in a universal visibility that no longer is comprised of the cutting out of the individual, multiple, fragmentary and mobile scenes which make up our perceptions.

  —Michel de Certeau, White Ecstasy

  The six months missing from the life of Saint Francis came after his visit to meet Malik al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt. It was at the time of the Crusades in the early thirteenth century and during a temporary truce. Francis and one of his brothers, Illuminato, left the encampment of soldiers on one side of the Nile and crossed over to Damietta, carrying nothing.

  Early into his meeting with the sultan, Francis offered to test each of their faiths by walking through fire. Who would God save, in such a situation, the Muslim or the Christian?

  Francis proposed that the wager could settle the question of heavenly preference once and for all, since each one was intransigent in his belief that his religion was the closest to the truth.

  The sultan was a Kurd, the same age as Francis, and a lover of Sufi religious poetry. He was highly cultivated and canny, someone who was interested in theology and philosophy; as we know now, a respectful exchange of intellectual property between Muslims, Jews, and Christians already dated back a few hundred years. Not just that: objects, artworks. (The rosary was adopted from Muslim prayer beads.)

  The sultan refused to take part in the trial by fire, saying that Allah alone knew who Christ was. Francis could not argue with this, and maybe realized that God might not intervene to pull him from the fire anyway, and so he sat down to talk with the sultan and his advisers instead. They continued to converse over many days.

  It was reported to be a happy experience for both of them.

  During that time Francis first saw the religious devotion of people who made their prayer life central to their daily routine, drawn by the glorious and otherworldly call to prayer from the minarets, and he heard the ninety- nine names of Allah recited, something he had never heard before.

  In the end Francis and Illuminato left the Saracen camp, without a peace agreement, but with affection for and protection from the sultan, and drifted back into the Holy Land, away from the armies of crusaders.

  Now began the six- month silence from Francis and his brother in the Holy Land; the two usually sent back reports of their whereabouts and activities.

  Friends had heard about the meeting with the sultan, the crosses in the carpets, the scholars, and rumors erupted about Francis lying on a bed of coals stark naked and the charm he exerted over the sultan and whores.

  But that was the end of any information for a while, myth or not.

  People say Francis could not have gone to Jerusalem, which was in ruins, and there are various theories about his attempts to live in poverty and harmony among Muslim villagers, in order to teach by example, not by force, but there is no written record of this.

  If he had become enchanted by the Qur’an, and was studying it, he could never tell anyone, under the circumstances. From his earliest years, Francis called himself a troubadour and sang Provençal songs aloud on the road.

  Apparently his fellow monks colluded in keeping him underground. The fact is, he seemed not to want to return anytime soon from overseas.

  Politically, his time with the sultan was considered a tactical failure, a madman’s liberal gesture, pathetic. So that period of silence has the aura of voluntary disappearance.

  It is possible that Francis, like others, fell in love with the silence of the desert, with the gardens and fruits and palm trees and fountains and marble buildings, sidereal skies.

  Like Muhammad Asad, the modern convert, he may have been blown over by what he witnessed in the desert:

  “On the way back from Arafat I found myself in the midst of a multitude of white- garbed Najdi beduins, riding in a tense gallop over the dusty plain—a sea of white- garbed men on honey-yellow, golden- brown and red-brown dromedaries—a roaring, earth-shaking gallop of thousands of dromedaries pushing forward like an irresistible wave—the tribal banners roaring in the wind and the tribal cries with which the men announced their various tribes and the warlike deeds of their ancestors … scattered in panic before our approach.”

  Francis was sickened by people wielding power, especially those who didn’t save sacred places from destruction during the barbaric Christian Crusades, when Emperor Frederick II failed to carry through on his word to come to that part of the world to witness and restrain the violence firsthand.

  But his six-month sojourn, outside of historical record, floats around the last six years of his life as a morning cloud covers the mountains in Umbria.

  When he returned home it was because he was called back to deal with infighting in the Franciscan Order. Changes had been introduced into his rule while he was away, and they contradicted the ideals he had fought for. One of these ideals was an imperative for him: no one should possess anything, and no money should be exchanged for any reason.

  He had little support from his friends for this rule, and ultimately it was the one the Franciscan Order had to abandon in order to be supported by the Vatican.

  The daring, faithful, and revolutionary Clare was almost the only one who held fast to his rule of poverty.

  She fought the hierarchy of bishops for this privilege, and won.

 
In Francis’s order, the men had become like modern company men who can complain all they want because they belong to the system they murmur against.

  They asked Francis:

  Without money and support, how can this order survive?

  Only by becoming a heretic sect, like the Cathars, and this was something neither the pope nor the Franciscan brothers wanted.

  They wanted to partake of the mysterious wafer that reproduced around the globe as a sign that we are outside time and inside nature.

  The Church Militant was on a rampage against heretics, and even called Islam a heretic sect at one point, in this way giving Muslims the status of Christians.

  Francis was disappointed that his friars were conceding to Rome. It was a mark of failure. He had failed.

  He had had a different vision of a religious life, which he had insisted on before he left for the Holy Land, and it only grew more obdurate: “Give everything away.”

  On his return he announced to his brothers that he would no longer be their abbot and went up Mount Alverno alone.

  Around the same time, when the childhood of the world was almost over, a boy organized a children’s crusade.

  This singular kid, born from the plague, the rats, and the ruins of a small French town, led all the children of that town and others away from their miseries and abuse; they went off to war to fight for peace.

  They called themselves Christian. Some were just poor. They called themselves children, but some were just small. All were suffering afflictions from the recent plague and Christian invasions so no one had much regard for life.