instead

of reading le monde, i am reading le new york times.

instead of writing my dissertation, i am reading about daphne merkin's struggle with her work avoidance and its contextual depression.

but what makes it all worth it is her quotation of writer and psychoanalyst adam phillips: “psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.”

brilliance.

gravity and grace

"it is necessary to uproot oneself. to cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it everyday"
-- simone weil

reading weil's "gravity and grace" on a saturday afternoon, blanket-covered and couch-supported, i am wondering about the splinters from these trees that we carry. carrying her cross was a task that weil did in solitude, a solitary seeker of god's grace, avoiding the comforts of community.

uprooted. cut.

how to use this image of her spiritual pilgrimage to drain the desolation i projected unto these two scenes i witnessed yesterday?

an old lady, sophisticated and lucid, whose loneliness was luminous around her, had attached to the gates of the jardin du luxembourg, above the dusty-green metallic folding chair in which she was sitting, a sign with spidery script: "parlez-moi" ("talk to me")...

as i was running around the jardin des plantes and great mosque in early afternoon, around every loop of my self-created track, i watched a moroccan man dressed in his ceremonial djellaba, ready for friday prayers, seated in the bench facing the mosque with unread book in lap, standing up and sitting down, but never getting the courage to go in...

i am reading weil's book like a map to find an answer to how it is that she transforms solitude into her path to god. in "gravity and grace," she writes: "this is how we have union with god - by not being able to approach him. distance is the soul of beauty."

i am in awe of, and troubled by, this single forest on her back which is her communing rod to the divine. this has always been the splinter, the thorn, that i constantly worry and cannot let alone - how distance, and the solitude that it implies, can contain both what is sublime and what is terrorizing. and i confess that i do not understand, so i will continue reading...

weil also quotes a poem from st. john of the cross:

“What is grace” I asked God.
And He said,
“All that happens.”

i need to continue reading...

an even later night

the apartment once nestling with visitors from various cities and continents is stilled from its frenzy. in just a few days, i was the trusty ferryman to air and rails. the luxury of having so many of the people that i love in one place, the same one, the epicenter of my heart, has spoiled me. i am betrayed by my melancholy which is dissonant with the glory which is paris in august - the warbling green of the poplars along the river Seine like so many rustling books, the unsuspected magic of the Eiffel Towers' lights strong enough to iron away my carefully-constructed urbanity, the simplicity of a dusk-covering walk while the limestone buildings gloam from golden to opal.

all this glory which was shared so recently with family - these remarkable people which karma has allowed me to travel this life together. the decision to compose this moment of my life abroad, away, is one which has gifted me with magic - or at least awakened me to magic. but it has also stretched the circle which i have to retrace in order to find my steps back home a little further. the distance is dizzying. and in the quietness of moments like this, i fear of tipping, of falling over. the fragility of being upside down. but perhaps, unlike other trees, i could have my roots up in the air. instead of being rooted in the earth, i could be rooted in the sky. displaced but not placeless.