Recovery of Roots
Simone Weil recognized “the need for roots”; Czeslaw Milosz named our age as one of homelessness. Both remind us that our work is always rooted in who we are.
By Tessa Carman
When Czeslaw Milosz published his Polish translation of Simone Weil’s selected writings in 1958, the flame of Weil’s brief life had been quenched for over a decade. Weil—mystic, teacher, activist, philosopher—had died in 1943 in London from a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis. She was thirty-four years old. Earlier that year, while working for the Free French, she had addressed the question of rebuilding France after the war in what would be her last completed work, L’Enracinement (The Need for Roots). In the shattering first decades of the twentieth century, wherein human lives were uprooted like so many weeds, she wrote: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
In his 1980 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Milosz named Weil as one of those writers “in whose school I obediently studied.” Milosz first encountered Weil’s name in the November 1945 issue of Politics, where Mary McCarthy’s translation of Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” appeared. Weil had written the piece after the fall of France to Germany five years earlier, in 1940. “Force,” wrote Weil, is that which “turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” Force affects both inflictor and inflicted, however. No one truly possesses it, she argued: force is “pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims.”
Milosz viewed Weil’s work as essential in thinking toward a third way, avoiding both Marxism and nationalist Catholicism—that is, “the type of religion that is only a social or national conformism.” He would also name Weil’s “deep concern with evil” as another reason for her influence on his thinking. Both Milosz and Weil, however, noted the disruption of the current modern predicament. In “Why Religion?” Milosz wrote that he lived at a time when a huge change in the contents of the human imagination was occurring”:
In my lifetime Heaven and Hell disappeared, the belief in life after death was considerably weakened, the borderline between man and animals, once so clear, ceased to be obvious under the impact of the theory of evolution, the notion of absolute truth lost its supreme position, history directed by Providence started to look like a field of battle between blind forces. After two thousand years in which a huge edifice of creeds and dogmas has been erected, from Origen and Saint Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Newman, when every work of the human mind and of human hands was created within a system of reference, the age of homelessness has dawned.
The poet looks back at the destruction, a reverse Sodom and Gomorrah—the fallen archons of this world blasting the houses of the innocent.
Homelessness
Weil recognized “the need for roots”; Milosz named our age as one of homelessness. In a letter to Thomas Merton in 1960, he expressed the need to recover “an image of the world, ordered by religion,” for modern man.
Scarcely a year after Weil’s death, in 1944, Milosz witnessed the destruction of Warsaw by the withdrawal of Nazi forces. (Weil had written in her essay that “the destruction of a city” is “the greatest calamity the human race can experience.”) Earlier, during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, where the evening quiet would be rent by the cries of Jews being murdered, Milosz had noted how softly, imperceptibly, the end of the world could come. In “A Song on the End of the World” he noted how monstrosity could caulk the cracks in the mundane:
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
With the obliteration of Warsaw, he and his wife, Janka, evacuated the city and moved through the country on foot—at one point they dug potatoes for a farmer in return for lodgings—before finding refuge near Kraków at the house of Catholic publicist Jerzy Turowicz. After helping Jewish families escape the Nazi purge in Poland, the Miloszes found themselves refugees at Turowicz’s table.
At Turowicz’s estate, Milosz wrote of their flight from Warsaw:
When we were fleeing from the burning city
And looked back from the first field path,
I said: “Let the grass grow over our footprints,
Let the harsh prophets fall silent in the fire,
Let the dead explain to the dead what happened.
We are fated to beget a new and violent tribe
Free from the evil and the happiness that drowsed there.
Let us go”—and the earth was opened for us by a sword of flames.
The poet looks back at the destruction, a reverse Sodom and Gomorrah—the fallen archons of this world blasting the houses of the innocent. But instead of turning into salt, the poet is further impressed with the reality of evil, and with the need to explain to the living what had happened.
Earlier that year, the Allies landed at Normandy to free Weil’s France—a deliverance she would not live to see. In Poland, upon Warsaw’s ruination, the Soviet Communists took command, and the country underwent another darkness.
In a 1981 interview in the New York Times, Milosz would explain that in “extreme situations” of affliction, such as that which he and others like Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam underwent, “good and evil acquire elemental force. Western civilization is losing that clear distinction: Everything can be explained away; everything is relative. In dramatic circumstances, you feel clearly the good forces and the demonic forces in action.”
This vision of Christianity—as the religion of the powerless, of those who have been treated as things, of those seeking salvation from force—and of Christ as a man subjected to force would shape her understanding of Christ and of her vocation.
Affliction
The disruptions of the twentieth century marked the first half of Milosz’s life. Before he lost Warsaw, he lost the Lithuania of his childhood. (He famously quipped that he was “one of the last citizens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”) The Russian Revolution, followed by the First World War and the Russo-Polish War, all uprooted his family’s life. His father, a road engineer who worked for the czar and then the Bolshevist government, traveled for his work but based his family in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. After the Revolution, they moved to the Lithuanian countryside. When Milosz returned to Vilnius, where he would study law, the city had become part of Poland.
In 1934–1935, Milosz visited Paris and met his uncle, Oskar Milosz, a poet and mystic who would then become his mentor; at the same time, Weil had taken a sabbatical from teaching and begun a year of factory work in order to have first-hand experience of the lives of the poor and the experience of affliction, or malheur—that is, the “uprooting of life,” a kind of suffering that enslaves the soul. The conclusion of this year of soul-crushing factory work marked the beginning of her awakening to Christianity: In 1935, after the year that “killed [her] youth,” her parents took her to Portugal. One day, she traveled alone, “in pieces, soul and body,” to a “wretched” little village, where she witnessed a procession of fishermen’s wives holding candles in honor of the village’s patron saint and “singing… hymns of a heart-rending sadness.” Here she experienced an epiphany: “Christianity is the religion of slaves par excellence… slaves cannot not adhere to it, and I too along with the others.” Later she would say that she had been given the “gift of affliction” by the Love who also suffered malheur, who was cursed in “his whole soul” while hanging crucified on the tree.
This vision of Christianity—as the religion of the powerless, of those who have been treated as things, of those seeking salvation from force—and of Christ as a man subjected to force would shape her understanding of Christ and of her vocation. After the year of the factory, she wrote that ever since “I have always regarded myself as a slave.” To imitate Christ in identifying with the oppressed and the outsiders—this she viewed as her particular calling, even so far as to refuse baptism.
However, in a letter to her friend Father Perrin, she noted the possibility that “one day I shall suddenly feel an irresistible impulse to ask immediately for baptism and I shall run to ask for it. For the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent.” In the meantime, she determined, she would follow Christ. “It is not my business to think about myself,” she wrote near the end of the same letter. “My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.”
To recover this kind of attention becomes one step to counter Force, and to recovering a rootedness of soul.
Exile
Milosz began serving in the Polish embassy for the new Communist government in 1945, stationed first in New York and then in D.C. When he visited Warsaw again in 1949, “it was if he were entering a prison inhabited by people steeped in hatred for those who ruled over them, people whose faces expressed fear.” A friend from Vilnius confided, “We are slaves here.”
In 1951 he decided to defect. With the help of a friend who despised Stalin, Milosz would live in Paris as a refugee for several years before accepting an offer to teach at UC Berkeley in 1960. He would continue to live in exile for the next thirty years until he resettled in Kraków in 1993.
Milosz sought still to keep rooted in his homeland by composing his poetry only in Polish. He also never forgot the Lithuanian countryside—especially the river and the trees beside his grandfather’s farm—where he grew up. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski eulogized Milosz thus: He had a “gift of combining raw observation of the moral and political world with a sense of things unseen, with a religious experience” and “a sharp, just judgment of earthly matters and an impassioned search after God.” As a poet who maintained a religious imagination as well as membership in the Catholic Church, Milosz embodied a sign of contradiction for two primary kinds of modern disillusionment: with religion, perceived as irrelevant and outmoded, and with poetry, perceived as an arcane word game. In “Against Incomprehensible Poetry,” Milosz noted that to be both a Catholic and a poet is heretical to the modern cult of art, wherein the poet is priest of a new religion that must exclude old forms. On the other hand, the kind of contemporary poetry that most interested Milosz was poetry that responded to modern man’s uprootedness. This poetry
observes the situation of man now, in this phase of scientific-technological civilization, with its lack of a foundation on which to base values, with its search for warmth and goodness in bonds of love and in the family, with its fear of transience and of death.
Amid “the disintegration of [modernity’s] complex of ideas,” this “postmodern” poetry responded to the loss of rootedness. To recover roots in a homeless world, this kind of poetry found inspiration in the ancient Far East, from Chinese and Japanese poetry in which “the macrocosm is reflected in each concrete detail, like the sun in a drop of dew.” To recover this kind of attention becomes one step to counter Force, and to recovering a rootedness of soul.
The disillusionment of the early twentieth century seemed to prove that the higher the aimed-at heaven, the harder the fall.
Grafting
In his essay “The Importance of Simone Weil,” Milosz noted that Weil rejected “the notion of progress in morality,” a mark of modernity “according to which crimes committed three thousand years ago can be justified to a certain extent because men at the time were ‘less developed.’” Weil dismissed both Christian and Marxist versions of this notion, excoriating the latter for positing that “by walking straight ahead one would ride into the air.” The disillusionment of the early twentieth century seemed to prove that the higher the aimed-at heaven, the harder the fall. But the idea of inevitable moral progress was not killed along with the atrocities of the twentieth century; rather, it seemed simply to undergo a new form once the cynical generation, which directly experienced the shattering of illusion, died. Milosz cites Leszek Kolakowski’s observation that Marxists practice theodicy, but with History as the deity rather than a personal God. However, Milosz points out that “belief in the magic blessings of History is being undermined by the very outcome of that belief: industrialization.” He writes further: “It is more and more obvious… that refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.”
This dream of wholeness remains, though now in a form that both Weil and Milosz both would see as devilish: transhumanism. According to this religion of final and complete efficiency, humanity does not have to be healed or saved from disintegration, but left behind. Such a direction directly opposes the “high degree of attention [Weil gave] to the sufferings of mankind.” Working within a theological framework shaped by her own Platonic-Christian synthesis, she could see that “a member of a technical civilization holds the position of a god [with regard to Nature], but he is a slave to society.” Weil, however, instead of escaping into the future, sided “with the oppressed,” becoming as much as she could one of those oppressed and on the outside.
We moderns are not remarkable for our experience of duality and longing for unity, but perhaps the modern world is distinct for its disillusionment and metaphysical confusion—both of which are shaped by Jacques Ellul’s la technique: that is, “the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” For Ellul, the machine does not comprehend technique: rather, “the machine represents only a small part of technique,” but yet “it represents the ideal towards which technique strives.” Just as Weil’s force treats persons as things, so “technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.”
In a poem Milosz wrote at Warsaw in 1945 (“Dedication”), the speaker asks, “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?” It’s a question that echoes throughout Milosz’s work, but especially what he wrote during and immediately after events such as the Warsaw Uprising. Can poetry be recovered after Warsaw? After Auschwitz? Yes, says Milosz: if we pay attention, if we do not ignore what has happened, if we respect the real. In his book-length A Treatise on Poetry, the poet decides to recognize the “common plight” not only of the suffering Poles, but for others who suffered during the same terrible years.
Poetry was one path Milosz took to rediscover the human and to explore the great expanse between those who would explain away suffering by the grand march of history and those who would allocate suffering to a pat place in a pat scheme, withholding the attention that Weil calls “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Often Milosz would recall this line from Weil: “Distance is the soul of beauty.” In a foreword to Jonas Mekas’s There Is No Ithaka, Milosz expounded on the “old truth” this sentence expresses: “only through a distance, in space or in time, does reality undergo purification. Our immediate concerns which were blinding us to the grace of ordinary things disappear and a look backward reveals them in their every minutest detail.”
Weil wrote that affliction, like force or “blind necessity,” is “indifferent,” that it “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.” Through the attention and the distance of poetry, Milosz sought to break through the force of technique and the enslavement of affliction into a space where the “secret and silent” action of grace could occur: a place, too, where “things”—human beings enslaved by force and technique—could again become grafted into the communion of the living.
What it means to “change the world” may be shaped far too much by the dazzling, multiplicitous possibilities of the digital age, and our putative mobility.
Attention
Weil lived in a white heat, writing and teaching despite ill health, taking on grinding factory jobs, sleeping on the floor and fasting in order to identify with the poor, and volunteering for spy work and military activity despite her almost disastrously bad eyesight. Flannery O’Connor wrote to her friend “A,” “Weil’s life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible.” Albert Camus, friend of both Weil and Milosz, wrote to Weil’s mother that she was “the only great spirit of our times.” Milosz described her in one essay as “antimodern, aloof, quixotic, a searcher for the ultimate truth” (“Shestov, or the Purity of Despair.”) Her work stands outside conventional categories of thought such that everyone has trouble putting her into a box. Her work insists, then, that we come to it humbly. And indeed, as Camus hoped, those who recognize Weil’s “overwhelming” witness ought to “have enough modesty to not try to appropriate” it. O’Connor wrote to the same friend a year later that Weil’s books were such “that I can’t begin to exhaust.” Weil, she wrote, “is a mystery that should keep us all humble.”
Milosz, like Weil, is able to attend to “intolerable suffering,” though in his case he did not have to seek it out. Both writers consider the oppression that humans impose upon themselves and each other with such acuity and compassion that theists, atheists, and those in between can appreciate their insights. But Weil would always remain a challenging spirit to Milosz: “I consider myself a Caliban,” he wrote. “Weil was an Ariel.”
“One would like to astound the world, to save the world,” wrote Milosz in The Land of Ulro (1977), “but one can do neither.” What can we do, then? “We are summoned to deeds that are of moment only to our village.” We can root ourselves, for, as Weil observed, “Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others.” What it means to “change the world” may be shaped far too much by the dazzling, multiplicitous possibilities of the digital age, and our putative mobility. More and more, however, our deepest social connections are mere tribes of the homeless, alliances of the uprooted.
The more we bear each other’s suffering, the more we can see that we are seen.
Suffering
In describing the reawakening the French poet Pierre Emmanuel had to undergo when he left Communism, Milosz noted the struggle to recover the weight of everyday language: “because doctrines which lead to paradise on earth, constantly pushed into a distant future, direct our eyes away from the earth, sensual things around us” (BBC talk, November 19, 1955). Milosz himself had to learn how to recover what Merton called his “younger earthy and cosmic self” in writing his great work of remembrance, A Treatise on Poetry.
Nature may be indifferent to suffering, but if we are to find meaning in what passes, we must “wrest” poetry—not meaning, for we must assume that it is there—from the world, loving the world more than our songs of it. It means paying attention to the world, but also resisting that which would enslave us and prevent us from loving each other. It means recognizing our conception of what is to be saved, and what it means to be astounded, may be diminished according to our own uprootedness. As David Cayley put it, in summarizing Ivan Illich’s thought on the age of systems, “it is only as suffering, embodied persons that we can turn and face one another.”
To pay attention, then, is still, as Mary Oliver writes, our “endless and proper work”—as poets, but also as human beings. Milosz and Weil both remind us that our work is always rooted in who we are, where “creation is working itself out,” in Tomas Tranströmer’s words. “You must change your life,” Rilke’s poem says, “for here there is no place / that does not see you.” We could go further: the more we bear each other’s suffering, the more we can see that we are seen.
Before her mortal fire was put out, it is said that Weil entered the waters of baptism, albeit irregularly.
Homecoming
Before her mortal fire was put out, it is said that Weil entered the waters of baptism, albeit irregularly. Her friend Simone Deitz recounts that, while in a Middlesex hospital in August 1943, Weil called for a priest to discuss baptism. The priest in question became irritated by Weil’s questions on whether she had to accept every item of Catholic doctrine. He called her “proud,” and left. Later, as Eric Springsted recounts,
Deitz asked Weil: “And now, are you ready to accept baptism?” Weil replied, “with much warmth,” “Yes.” Deitz took water from the tap and pronounced the formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
A few days later, she arrived home.
Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.