Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burdens of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease -- all these constitute divine love. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. But if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough "I" in us to make it possible to surrender the "I" for love's sake. Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen so that we cease to be.
--Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace
and in the margin of weil's text, the woman i love has written:
there would be no delay,
no existence
Belas fotografias e texto...Espectacular....
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so gorgeous, the first image, i can't believe what happens in the lower dark part of it, that intense movement of the world, the swirling of energy, when the upper part is so still and seems to be beyond movement, caught forever in a geometric perfection...
ReplyDeletei am sorry to disappoint you here, but i can't relate to simone here - Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burdens of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease -- all these constitute divine love
i could never grasp this christian concept of love, it may be my limitation, i find the book of job appalling - not job, he is truly a wonderful image of the grace and noble spirit a human being can be able of... but god! i have recently read Jung's take on the matter, have you? and i agree with him, there is nothing which can justify god's behaviour toward job. i was discussing this with my students during a seminar (a parallel to Faust) - and one of the students, with a similar view to mine, replied to another one, who was defending the christian view (job is a model for all of us, he surrendered completely): "but not job is the problem here, god is".
instead of such "love", the buddhist empty ground of all existence is a much better choice, i think :-) i believe the christians have always had a very hard job at justifying the presence of evil in the world, not at all convincing, to me.
i am sorry for such a long and trivial reply, but i simply couldn't remain silent, i have struggled with it a lot :-)
I love all these chillingly austere photographs, James. As for the Weil quote, I agree with both Roxana and Erin -- the further layers all dissolve in immateriality. Although I agree on most of the individual points Ms. Weil makes, I totally disagree with her conclusion. The whole journey for me is distilled to the opportunity for the I to be evaporated like water (and brought back down as rain); that's exactly why things are structured the way they are, not to prevent that very thing from happening.
ReplyDeletelove the first pic, the solidness, motionless of the lake against the rapid movement of the snow. The Weil quote is interesting but I disagree, I don't think these things constitute divine love, more telling for me is where it says that the spirit of god himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
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