In August 1940, joining thousands fleeing the German invasion, the philosopher and activist Simone Weil arrived with her parents in Marseille. In Weil’s mind, it was to be nothing more than a short stay. France’s surrender to the Nazis – and the establishment of the collaborationist Vichy republic – had thrown her into despair. Determined to escape, she had already applied for a teaching post in North Africa and a short-term Portuguese visa. Her intention, according to her friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, was an indirect voyage to England, ‘to join those who were continuing to fight’.
The plan didn’t work out. The family remained in Marseille until May 1942. Weil’s first response to her frustrated aims was practical. She began to advocate on behalf of French colonial workers imprisoned in immigration camps; she corresponded with exiled anti-fascists; she made contact with Resistance networks. But in the agitated months that followed she also channelled her rage into a determined theoretical excavation – expressed in an extraordinary flow of letters, notebooks, and essays – of the moral plight of France and of contemporary European civilisation. What, she wanted to know, were the deeper forces behind the nation’s capitulation to fascism? And what were the historical and social factors culminating in totalitarianism? It was an endeavour which led her to new depths of historical understanding and an ever more determined sense of spiritual vocation.
As the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson points out in her wonderful new book, Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, Weil’s intellectual trajectory in Marseille was strongly shaped by her involvement with the local literary journal Cahiers du Sud. Edited by Jean Ballard, Cahiers championed avant-garde aesthetics and advocated for an anti-fascist politics that, Robertson explains, ‘we would now call decolonial’. It was also committed to exploring the complex regional histories of Mediterranean France, not least the flowering of Occitan culture in Provence and the Languedoc, which lasted from the 11th to the 13th centuries, nurturing both the remarkable effervescence of vernacular poetry associated with the troubadours and the heroic, proto-anarchist asceticism of the Cathar heresy.
If the modern French state emerged from the gradual unification of two culturally distinct nations – north and south – then this was a process brutally initiated by the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade: an act of Inquisitorial warfare in which monarchical northern France, backed by the Papacy, annihilated the historic culture of the Languedoc – then a semi-independent principality – under the pretext of eliminating the Cathar heresy. ‘After the war with the Albigenses’, Weil wrote to her spiritual interlocutor Fr. Joseph-Marie Perrin, ‘it was the Church which was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe’. For Weil, in other words, the Albigensian Crusade marked the origins of modern France in an act of ideologically-sponsored colonial repression, and could therefore be seen as the point zero of the contemporary situation. With the other members of the Cahiers du Sud milieu, Weil came to share a conviction that renewed attention to the Albigensian Crusade, and to the defeated culture of the Languedoc, might provide a critical vantage on modern French politics – helping both to diagnose the meaning of the present and to imagine new political futures. Central to the development of this project was a 1942 special issue of the journal on ‘the genius of Occitan’, to which Weil contributed two essays.
Lisa Robertson’s new translation of the second of these essays, ‘En quoi consiste l’inspiration occitanienne’, forms the centrepiece of Anemones, a volume gorgeously produced by the Amsterdam-based art organisation If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. The book’s title was inspired by a remark in one of Weil’s high-school essays – a commentary on Grimm’s ‘Fairy Tale of the Six Swans’. The protagonist of this story is a princess. When her brothers are turned into swans by a wicked stepmother, she must gather starflowers – sternenblumen – spinning them into thread and sewing shirts which will restore her siblings’ human form. In Weil’s gloss, Grimm’s starflowers become the common white anemone flower, and the six-year labour of their transformation into magical garments – conducted, in the story, under conditions of exile, subjection and ridicule – becomes an emblem of the strength inherent in passivity.
Grimm’s princess wins her power from an act of quiet, creative commitment guided by love. By the time she wrote her essays for Cahiers du Sud, Weil herself had long been refining her prose into something gnomic and compressed. As Robertson notes in her introductory remarks, Weil’s work on ‘the Occitan inspiration’ is characteristic of her mature style. Suppressing exposition, and letting connections remain implicit, the essay verges on aphorism; its coiled quickness of phrase implies a conviction animated by desire and a sense of historical urgency.
In Weil’s account, the exemplary story of Occitan culture begins with what she referred to, elsewhere, as the ‘most dreadful phenomenon’ of Roman imperialism. The Roman Empire, Weil believed, had laid a blueprint for every false universalism imposed by force: glorifying violence and suppressing local cultures, the Romans brought a situation of ‘spiritual sterility’ to Europe, eclipsing the legacy of Ancient Greece. In the Languedoc, however, a flicker of ancient Platonistic religion had somehow survived, leading to the development of a unique and idiosyncratic local Christianity.
At the centre of Occitan spirituality, according to Weil, was a bitter recognition of the fundamental primacy of violence and physical coercion in the material world. Yet this recognition, rather than inspiring a Machiavellian politics of will, was channelled into infinite compassion for everything subject to the law of force and the aspiration to a social process founded in the practice of mutual consent. These values, Weil argues, can be found in both the troubadour cult of fin’amor – the refined (or refining) love celebrated in medieval Occitan poetry – and in the dualist ontology of the Cathars, who saw the whole field of material forces as an embodiment of evil. When the Occitan culture was eradicated, so, too, were ideals which might have nurtured a genuinely non-coercive politics. Their loss opened a path to the triumphalism of the High Gothic and to the Promethean humanism of the Renaissance. Both, Weil argues, were a continuation of the Roman legacy – glorifying, rather than repudiating force. For Weil, the triumph of force was the situation of WW2. Her terms are stark: ‘Evil came to fruition and we are among evil’.
The hybrid nature of Anemones makes it a tricky prospect for summary and review: it’s both an idiosyncratic scholarly edition of Weil’s essay – itself complex, compressed, and intimately entangled in the philosopher’s eccentric conceptual universe – and a rich addition to Robertson’s own ongoing and multi-faceted engagement with the medieval Occitan lyric, a corpus of texts often considered the origin of modern poetry (the first avant-garde, as Robertson has it). It’s easy to see why Weil’s essay might have intrigued Robertson. As she acknowledges, Weil’s account, although it plainly states that ‘nobody can hope to revive the place of Oc’, also seeks to eradicate the distance between ‘the Occitan genius’ and the sources of a genuine emancipatory politics in the present. But where Weil is focused on the restitution of spiritual truths, Robertson uses the textual apparatus of Anemones to shift our focus towards the rich resources of art. The Occitan troubadours, Robertson suggests, were the progenitors of ‘an alternative tradition hidden at the core of European lyric poetry’: ‘a profound and contemporary history of resistance’.
In Weil’s account of lost Occitan values, Robertson finds an important blueprint for her own ongoing project on troubadour poetics, wide rime, a body of work encompassing various lectures, translations, and the chapbooks Starlings and poorsong one (both 2017). In Anemones, Weil’s essay is kaleidoscopically refracted by a host of other texts – a scholarly and creative apparatus that draws out the manifold potentialities Robertson senses in the original. There is Robertson’s detailed commentary and gloss, conducted through footnotes and a long prefatory essay. There are extracts from Robertson’s correspondence with the artist Benny Nemer, discussing Weil as a source of inspiration, and arranging and documenting the performance of ‘a series of floral actions’ (in which Nemer would deliver a bouquet of flowers – the titular anemones – to the seven dedicatees of Robertson’s book, all of them poets and artists: Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, Caroline Bergvall, Erín Moure, Denise Riley, Jacques Roubaud and sabrina soyer). Finally, in addition to the appreciatory vidas (short biographies) written for each of these dedicatees, there is ‘Lark’, Robertson’s augmented translation of Bernart de Ventadorn’s twelfth-century poem Can vei la lauzeta mover – a work briefly yet suggestively discussed by Weil.
It was not without some difficulty that Robertson came to appreciate the significance of Weil’s work on Occitan culture. Initially ‘troubled, to the point of being revolted’, by the ‘insistence on purity’ in Weil’s philosophical writings, it was only gradually that Robertson came to consider Weil’s use of this term as an attempt to reclaim it from fascist misappropriation. Indeed, purity emerges as a central concept in Anemones, naming both ‘a quality of social relationships’ motivated by love and a form of attention special to poetry. Throughout the book, Robertson’s engagement with Weil helps focus the nature of her own impulsions: to a ‘lovingly-committed living in the world’, to a mode of ‘discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering of our intellectual and spiritual beings’, to the ‘social practice of consensual relationship’. In addition to ‘purity’, ‘consent’ – with its full etymological richness of feeling together – is a central concept in Anemones: a quality of relationships defined by love. It may seem strange that Robertson should extract this worldly focus from Weil’s engagement with Catharism, a religion usually associated with a stark dualism of spirit and matter. Yet Weil’s understanding of Occitan spirituality is also very much in keeping with her own paradoxically worldly theology. She finds a dualism in Occitan culture, not between matter and spirit per se, but between the world considered under different aspects of its being – love and force.
How does this apply to the troubadours? Weil’s own remarks on this question are gnomic and fragmentary, if frequently inspired. She only ever quotes from one troubadour poem – the opening lines of Can vei la lauzeta mover – and that only briefly. Here, in Paul Blackburn’s translation, is the opening strophe, a beautiful example of the troubadour trope of reverdie (re-greening):
When I see the lark stir her wings for joy against the sunlight, forgetting herself letting herself fall with the sweetness that comes into her heart, AIE! so great an envy comes on me to see her rejoicing I wonder that my heart does not melt with desiring.
In Weil’s gloss, the poem expresses ‘a joy so pure that through it a poignant pain is reflected’ – an identity of opposing feelings that Weil presents as fundamental to the mortal condition, and therefore central to the emotional force of poetry. For Weil, to experience the beauty of the world – as Bernart’s speaker does in seeing the lark – means succumbing to a complete suspension of the will. It is an experience which, while both affirming the motive force of love in world and opening us to the miracle of embodiment – of sensibility as radically given rather than self-willed – also reveals the limitations of an earthly condition. ‘We want to get behind beauty’, Weil writes in Waiting for God, ‘but it is only a surface … We should like to feed upon it, but it is merely something to look at’.
To know beauty, in other words, is parallel to what Weil calls affliction, the experience of absolute powerlessness. Registering a participation in the sweet affliction of joy – an emotion registered in the asemantic cry, ‘AIE!’ – the opening of Bernart’s poem foreshadows the poem’s subsequent dramatization of a movingly human struggle to accept the spiritual lessons of such dispossession as they relate to the experience of love. As we can see, the speaker of the poem experiences identification with the lark. Just as the lark surrenders itself to sweetness, so the speaker feels they are about to ‘melt with desiring’. Yet this identification also makes the speaker aware of a distance, a separation: ‘an envy comes upon me to see her’. The pain of worldly beauty is that we briefly experience participation in transcendent love – and yet we remain ourselves: a separate, mortal, and afflicted body. If there’s a lesson in Can vei, then, it’s that the renunciation of will – as central to the making of poems, according to troubadour tradition, as to the true pursuit of love – is painful and far from easy. It’s a lesson deftly tested and explored in Robertson’s own ‘augmented translation’ of Bernart’s poem, a multi-part verse adaptation from the original, which is placed towards the end of Anemones.
For Weil, the fin’amor of troubadour lyric was a preparation for the love of God. What matters in these poems is impossibility, the fact that the loved one can’t be possessed by force or will – love is a training in the humility necessary for grace. Some scholars dismiss such readings of the poems. The troubadours, they argue, can only be correctly valued if the full frankness of their sensuality is appreciated. And yet in a poem like Bernart’s, as Weil saw, sensuality grounds the possibility of spiritual insight. It was a fact which Weil, on account of her idiosyncratic personal theology, was uniquely able to affirm. ‘Carnal love’, she thinks in a notebook, ‘is the quest for the Incarnation’.
It’s this, I find, that makes reading Weil so thrilling. Her mysticism is so worldly that it might aptly be described as atheistic; she shows us the essential in the abject and mundane. Likewise, in reading Robertson reading Weil I began to see how love could be identical to politics in the troubadours: how their celebration of extramarital love, for example, is also the critique of a sacrament, marriage, which transforms love into property – and thus of the whole system of property relations; how their focus on lyric inspiration as a surrender to the arbitrary shape of love is totally contrary to the valorisation of productive mastery that governs our lives; how love and sex acknowledge a quantity that transcends the zero-sum logic of economic competition, the battle for resources – ‘giving joy, I am enjoyed’, as the troubadour, Jaufré Rudel has it.
With Anemones, in other words, Robertson gives us tools to continue Weil’s excavation of the Occitan genius – and to imagine a post-troubadour aesthetics adequate to an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist politics of consent. And just as Robertson’s commentaries propose new understandings of Weil, so reading Weil allows a broader sense of the importance of the troubadours to Robertson’s intellectual project. Take Weil’s notion of attention, for example, a concept Robertson discusses in an extended footnote. Attention, as Weil imagines it, isn’t something paid to an object or idea. Attention lets its object appear, consenting to the object’s mode of being. It is a quality that might describe both the mode of composition of a poem and the habit of receptivity that the best poems encourage. Certainly, this seems to be the case with the troubadours, where composition is always linked to a form of porous sensitivity inspired by love – attention to nature, to the beauty and desire of the beloved, to the politics of signs within a courtly language. Indeed, according to a thought fleshed out across the troubadoric corpus, love, like attention, has to be consistently re-begun. Love can’t simply be professed and then considered final: rather, in re-affirming feeling, the poet-lover is always being born anew. Love necessitates the spirit of improvisation moving through troubadour poetry, in which each attempt to let love speak demands new rhymes, new metrical patterns, new images, even new words.
In the universe of the troubadours, love is constituted by an opening of attention to renewal – to a spirit which animates the natural world and find its microcosm in human connection. It is an idea elaborated in numerous troubadour verses, often in conjunction with the governing metaphor of spring. Here’s the opening of a poem by Jaufré Rudel, evocatively rendered by Blackburn:
When, from the spring, the stream
runs clear, so in Spring
sun clears the air,
eglantine appears.
The nightingale in brake
Modulates, clarifies his song,
Softens it, reiterates,
Polishes and sweetens it:
Only right that I my own song soften.
Anemones is infused with this same sense of writing as a process of continual emergence and modulation, an act of loving attention moving towards difficult clarity. ‘Each time I return to the source text’, Robertson writes, explaining the challenge of translation, ‘it has changed in my absence’. To remain faithful to the object text, the translator must become a lover, affirming the essential value of consent: ‘The text will have its own will, velocity, opacity or interpretability, its own essential fungibility, which the reader can only submit to, or collaborate with, but never control’. It’s a lesson applicable to any act of writing: in the process of composition, we are always also the reader of an emergent shape of thought.
We might say that Robertson assents to and collaborates with Weil throughout this volume, allowing herself to be moved and changed by an unfamiliar conceptuality. And yet she ends up sounding exactly like herself, revealing new approaches to familiar concerns. Through respect for the other, Robertson affirms, we expand the truth and potential of our own inwardness. Less a scholarly edition of an essay than it is the poematic transmission of an ethics of consent, Anemones helps me understand a quality richly present across so much of Robertson’s writing: the text as an extension of permission – an invitation to think and feel with and through the various thinkers with whom Robertson finds such subtle and rich affinities. In reading it, I found myself inspired by Robertson’s joyful seriousness about the life of the mind. Most of all, it made me want to write, and to believe that writing could matter, even, or especially, in its anonymity – in the creation of a hidden republic: a land without borders or the territorial apparatus of the State; a place refined by love.