radiant fracture

Rain has been pouring on the house since six am. I had to turn on the heat. Through the skylights, the house is bathed in an aqua-silver twilight, though it's the middle of the morning.

The poem in the Poetry newsletter today was about Simone Weil.

I quite liked it. It is sad, a poem of loss.

Poussin

After T.J. Clark


Two underworlds, in Poussin.

The one touched by the force
of necessity, the other
remaining untouched.

Simone Weil makes her way
to the refectory
in Ashford. She walks slowly
down the corridors, with
or without help.

The hem of her gown brushes
the maculate plaster
of the long wall.

She could live forever
inside this moment,
she thinks, or begins to think
(the beginning of a thought).

She is wrong, of course.

The great hand bravely
channels the fear our mouths
have become, so suddenly.

Just the base of the thumb
illuminated, in its
flex, away from the viewer.

Two underworlds,
& the pollen settling
against the washerwoman’s
drying fabrics:

semantic parlor
in which the magic lantern
images flicker.

Weil’s elbow, akimbo
with what’s left of her body,
& Weil herself,
aware of the image
she becomes in the long hall.

It doesn't have to mean
anything, the other patients
who saw her
or whom she saw,
their depleted & depleting
forms.

Ignorance is my true labor.
The text wounds me
into a history
of belief, phrase by phrase.
(The forensics, Weil
might well have stressed.)

The chaste thirst
of the classical
running alongside its own
shadow, its double
it can’t, ultimately, know.

Two underworlds:

the foreshortening
of the prone body, & the cry
that precedes it,
genuflecting
to the fiction that it trusts.

* * * * * *

The poem sounds ekphrastic to me ("Just the base of the thumb / illuminated, in its /
flex, away from the viewer"), but I have not found such an image.

I know Weil almost exclusively through "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," so it's that mind I listen for here, and hear whispers: "two underworlds," "The chaste thirst / of the classical / running alongside its own / shadow, its double."

(Although -- is any thirst of the classical chaste? Mine certainly isn't, though it may be pure.)

Of Weil's other philosophy and theology, I cannot really say whether or how it speaks here. If you know her work better, please chime in.

* * * * * *

You can find the poem on the Poetry Foundation website here. The page includes a recording of Waldrep reading the poem, but he uses Poet Voice, and I cannot recommend it. I turned it off because it was making me like the poem less.

§rf§

[ETA] Note: the T.J. Clark this is after seems to be the British art historian, who writes about ekphrastic poetry in the LRB here.

Oh