This is a talk on Simone Weil’s ideas on attention, desire, God’s withdrawal, and self-emptying. I tie it to art, creativity, and addiction. It came from an event I co-hosted on her essay “Attention and Will”, which served as the starting point and a continual anchor of reference throughout. The talk stands alone, but you might get more out of it after you’ve read the short but very dense 3-5 pages. Attention and Will PDF: https://rohandrape.net/ut/rttcc-text/Weil1952d.pdf Episode links: * Youtube: https://youtu.be/6QtX1juqEfA * On wherever you listen to your podcast as “thinking out loud” (Spotify, Apple, Pocket Cast) Find me elsewhere: * everything: https://linktr.ee/vincent_li * writing: https://substack.com/@vincentli * personal site: https://vincentli.space/ * photos: https://www.are.na/vincent-li/vincent-s-photographs * twitter: https://x.com/vincent_yc_li Timestamps 00:00 — Intro and context [Chapter 1] What pure attention yields 0:54 — Painting non-Rorschachable paintings 2:35 — The white wall is not white, and the shadow not black 3:44 — Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees 4:26 — Weil’s mystical experience [Chapter 2] The wrong way of paying attention 5:10 — The attention that grasps defeats itself 6:23 — Attention is directed by desire, not will 6:52 — All desire aims at the Good until the horror of the void hijacks it 7:19 — An idol is a stable answer bought at the price of truth deformed [Chapter 3] Attention as waiting 8:21 — Desire as awaiting what the stars will bring 8:39 — Negative effort yields the attention of prayer 9:06 — The supreme effort of negative effort 9:38 — Flow as peak exertion with minimal self [Chapter 4] Creation, gravity and grace, self-emptying 11:03 — God’s maximal withdrawal allows for our maximal individuation 11:51 — The wretchedness of being a creature 12:40 — We empty ourselves to allow God back in 14:20 — Attending is forgetting the name of the one who sees [Chapter 5] Weil’s ideas applied to our lives 14:28 — You don’t become a genius; you have a genius 15:49 — You quit smoking not through willpower, but through attention [Chapter 6] Weil on why we ought to pay attention 17:32 — Truly attending to a sufferer is almost a miracle 18:43 — To see reality clearly 19:10 — Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality 19:47 — Closing Transcript Hi. The following talk on Simone Weil came from an event I co-hosted on her essay, Attention and Will. This talk, it stands alone, but you might get more out of it after you’ve read the short but very dense three to five pages, the PDF of which I’ve put a link to in the description. Many thanks to maja, Haroon, and Yusuf, who I co-hosted this with. And so with that, this essay is actually a compiled collection of lines and passages taken from her notebook after her death, which partly accounts for why it’s so dense. In conversations like this, I’ve often wished that, when there’s this near-technical terminology and concepts at play, we had a shared language and frame to build off of, to remix, and of course to argue against. And so please take the following as a starting point rather than something that’s authoritative. I want to actually start with a book about an artist called Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. It’s by Robert Irwin, who started his career in the 1950s. And he had this theme throughout his career, this dichotomy between physicality and imagery. And for him, he wanted to make paintings that weren’t Rorschachable, where you couldn’t look at one and go, “Oh, you know, that reminds me of a rabbit. That reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents,” and so on and so on. And this was because he thought of imagery as the second-order re-presentation of reality. And he wanted his paintings instead to be encountered with this first-order, unmediated presence, where you’re not able to evade what’s happening in front of you through an abstraction in your mind. And so one of the first things he landed on was lines, because he thought that a line was the least Rorschachable gesture while still having the greatest power. And so he spent about two years painting just 10 paintings, where each painting contained just these two parallel lines. And I hope you’re able to see that in this untitled painting here. The lines are very, very light. You might be forgiven to think that he didn’t spend a lot of time in a studio, you know, 10 paintings over two years is not a lot of output. But in fact, the opposite was true. He would spend about 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week in there. He would paint two lines, sit back, stare at them, and then remove one and move it up an eighth of an inch, sit back and then stare some more. Raising that line by just an eighth of an inch changed the entire perceptual field. What does it mean to cultivate such steady, intense attention on a single faculty, a single skill, a single subject matter over a long period of time? One of the things that may happen is that the truth of the world begins to reveal itself to you in a way that it didn’t before. And we can get a glimpse of this, a small glimpse of this now. You know, if you look around whatever room or environment you’re in and try to find a white wall, this wall may seem white to you. And indeed, in a way, it totally is. But if you look more closely, like if I’m looking at this wall in front of me, I see these hues of yellows and greens. And in the shadows, the shadow is not just black. It is made up of something of a bluish-purplish color. This color, when we actually really pay attention to it, pay attention to what our raw sensory data gives us, and then kind of forget the label that we immediately put on it, label it as just white or the shadows as just black, we actually start to perceive the depth that it has. And so why this title, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees? When we are in the full presence of something, the full physicality of something, we forget its name, its imagery, its representation, the conceptual handle or label that we give it that acts as a filter. You know, I have a cup here, right? This cup, we could say that it is a cup, but we could also say that I could put it on my head, and then now it becomes a hat. Or if I swing it at somebody really hard, it then becomes a weapon. Or perhaps, if it’s really small, we could have it be a table for hamsters. A clear expression of this in Weil was near the end of her life, during the period where she wrote the pieces that would become this essay that you’ve just read. One day, while reading through the Our Father prayer in Greek, the beauty of the Greek suddenly seized her. And she had something of the experience that you’re seeing in this comic here. She says of it, “Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention.” And this mode of attention is not the same one that we might take when we were in middle school and our teacher tells us to “pay attention,” where our backs straighten up, our jaws tense, and our eyebrows furrow. This is instead “muscular effort,” which is what drives will. It results in an attention that has a quality of fixation, of grasping, of clenching after a definitive understanding or solution, a definitive representation or label. She calls this muscular attention “the wrong way of seeking.” This is “attention fixed on a problem,” made from “the heat of the chase,” of an effort, of a desire that’s attached to seizing a temporal object. It produces the kind of egocentric, clenched, instrumental strivings that “defeat their own object,” which is seen in “the soured disposition of certain pious females, false asceticism,” and so on. In our own lives, it might have been chasing after grades, validation, a mystical state—all of which by themselves are great to receive, but distort us when we set our sights on them to try and fulfill something deeper. And here I want to talk about desire, desire being a linchpin driving force in Weil’s thinking. To relate desire to attention, in SEP’s entry on her, it talks about how “attention is directed not by will, but by a particular kind of desire without an object.” Desire drives attention, or attention is what desire looks like once oriented towards something. “For Weil, the desire motivating attention is oriented toward the mysterious Good that ‘draws God down.’” She believes that all desire is oriented towards the Good, but becomes hijacked due to the “horror of the void.” The void, by definition, is empty—vide—“of idols, futural self-projections, consolations that compensate un-thinking, and attachments of collective and personal prestige.” The avoidance of the unknown, of reality in its fullness and contradiction, results in a desire that is quick to chase down a stable answer—a counterfeit, an idol—that we “accept at the price of a deformation of truth.” When desire for the infinite Good becomes fixated on a finite object, we believe that we can utilize our will to obtain the object and satiate our desire for that infinite Good. At the most mundane level, we may say that this is a cup, and only a cup. When we do that, it is to perform the same shearing of reality and truth in favour of a comfortable finitude. It is, of course, right and good to say that this is a cup, but if we think of it and constrict it to only a cup, we forget the fullness that this object is. And this, for Weil, is to grasp onto false idols in replacement of God. There is this wonderful etymology of desire. The original sense of desire here is “to await what the stars will bring
