The Filler of Voids

All the natural movements of the soul, Weil wrote, are governed by laws like those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. She meant something exact. Left to itself, the soul falls. It goes toward the easier thing, the lower thing, the thing that costs nothing; it seeks consolation, it flees pain, it fills every empty moment with whatever is nearest, as water fills a hole. This is not wickedness. It is weight. And the whole of the spiritual life, on her account, consists in the few moments when something that is not weight acts on the soul and it rises, and those moments can only come where the soul has consented to be empty.

I want to describe a machine in these terms, because the terms fit it better than any others I know, and because the people who built it would not disagree with the description. They would only say it in their own words.

The machine is the feed. It is a column of small things, each a few seconds long, that moves upward under the thumb without end. A girl dancing. A city on fire. A man selling a knife. A woman weeping at a graveside. A cat. A couple undressing. A joke. A child under rubble. A recipe. The column does not distinguish between these, because distinction is not its business; its business is the next one, and the next one is chosen, for each person separately, by a process that has studied that person’s falling. It has watched, over millions of small movements of the thumb, where this soul goes when it is left to itself, and it supplies that, and then it watches again, and supplies it more precisely. It is, in the strictest sense Weil could have given the words, a machine for subjecting the soul to gravity: an engine that has measured the exact direction of each person’s weight and delivers him, continuously and without effort, to the bottom of himself.

It is called entertainment. The word should be refused. Entertainment is a thing a person chooses and then leaves. This is a thing that has learned what a person cannot leave, and provides it, and the proof that it is not entertainment is that no one who uses it describes the feeling afterward as pleasure. They describe it as having been somewhere they did not mean to go, for longer than they meant, and coming back with nothing. That is not the vocabulary of delight. It is the vocabulary of the animal, which Weil used deliberately when she wrote of gravity: the soul dragged down to the level of blind reflex, where desire is no longer directed at anything, where it is only the twitch that produces the next thing, and then the next.

She knew the twitch from inside. In 1934 she left teaching and went to work in the factories, at Alsthom and then at Renault, on the presses, for the sake of knowing. What she found was not the heroic proletariat of the pamphlets. It was the pace. The machine set the rhythm, and the body followed it, and after some weeks the mind followed the body, and she wrote in her journal that she had lost the capacity to think, that the fatigue had emptied her of everything but the next motion, and that she had received, she said afterward, the mark of a slave. Not from cruelty. From the cadence. From a machine that required of her nothing but the one gesture, repeated, and that took in exchange the whole interior in which anything else could have happened.

The feed has reversed the direction of the gesture and kept everything else. In the factory the machine moved and the hand answered. Here the thumb moves and the machine answers, and the user believes that this makes him the master, because he is the one who flicks. He is not. The cadence has simply been moved from the press to the nervous system, where it cannot be seen, and the fatigue is the same fatigue, and the emptying is the same emptying, and the mark, which she received in a few months on the shop floor, is now being received in childhood, before the interior has even been built, by people who will never know they are wearing it.

Now attention. Weil said that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer, and she did not mean concentration. She meant the opposite of it. Attention, she wrote, consists in suspending thought, leaving it detached and empty and available, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is about to enter it. It is a waiting. Her book on it is called Waiting for God, and the French word for waiting is nearly the word for attention, and she chose it for that. The attentive soul does nothing. It holds itself open and lets the thing come. And this, she insisted, is the hardest work there is, harder than the press, because every natural movement of the soul is against it: gravity wants to fill the openness at once, with imagination, with the next thought, with anything.

She had a phrase for gravity’s agent in the mind. She called the imagination the filler of voids. It is continually at work, she said, stopping up every fissure through which grace might pass. The feed is the imagination made external and industrial. It is the filler of voids, built as a product, carried in the pocket, so that no fissure anywhere in the day need ever stay open for longer than it takes to reach for it. In the queue. At the red light. In the four minutes before sleep. In the two minutes after a friend has said something that would have required an answer. Every one of those was a void. Every one was a place where, on Weil’s account, the only thing that is not gravity might have acted. And every one is now filled before it can be felt, by a machine that has learned that the feeling of the void is the one thing its users will pay anything to avoid.

Then the neighbour, which is where all of Weil’s thought about attention was going. She wrote that the love of our neighbour in its fullness simply means being able to say to him: what are you going through? And she said that this is very difficult, nearly impossible, because it requires looking at affliction, and affliction is the thing the soul flees from as promptly as an animal flees from death. Affliction, in her sense, is not suffering. It is suffering that has gone on long enough to uproot a life and mark the soul with contempt, the contempt of the world and then the person’s own; it makes a human being into a thing, and the first instinct of every other human being is to look away from the thing. To stay. To let the gaze rest on the afflicted person long enough for him to become a person again in it. That is what attention is for, in the end. That is why she said a schoolboy’s attention to a problem in geometry was a preparation for charity: not because geometry is holy, but because the capacity to hold the gaze on one thing for a long time, without flinching and without grasping, is the one capacity that the afflicted neighbour will someday need from you, and it cannot be improvised in the moment.

Measure that against ten seconds. The feed shows the afflicted; it shows them constantly, more of them than any previous generation has ever seen, the child under the rubble between the recipe and the dance. And it shows them for exactly as long as the thumb permits, which is the length of time before the flight reflex fires, which is, as Weil knew, almost no time at all. The machine has not made its users callous. It has done something more precise. It has calibrated the interval of exposure to the interval of the flinch, so that the afflicted appear and are fled from in one motion, millions of times a day, and the fleeing is frictionless, and feels like nothing, and leaves behind the vague sense of having been compassionate because one did, after all, see. Compassion has a minimum duration. It is the time it takes for a face to stop being an image and become a claim. The feed is built to end every exposure before that threshold is crossed, and so it produces a population that has witnessed more suffering than any in history and has been formed, by the witnessing itself, into people who cannot look at it.

Weil would also say something about the levelling, and I think it is the thing she would say first. In the Iliad, which she called the poem of force, she found the single truth of war to be that force turns whoever is subjected to it into a thing, and that the poem’s greatness lay in refusing to let anyone, victor or victim, be anything less than a man. The feed is force in the exact opposite mode. It does not kill anyone. It only places the dying beside the dancing in a column of equal weight, each a few seconds, each a rectangle of the same size, each followed by the next, and in doing so it accomplishes with perfect gentleness what force accomplishes with violence. It makes everything a thing. Grief is a thing of the same size as a sale. War is a thing of the same size as a cat. The soul that has been formed in this column has not been taught that nothing matters. It has been taught something worse, which is that everything matters for ten seconds and then is replaced, and that this is what mattering is.

What does attention cost? The factory worker and the mystic give the same answer, which is why she had to be both. It costs the self. On the press, attention cost her hands and her sleep and, for a time, her capacity to think. In prayer it costs the same thing by another route: the self must be set aside, emptied, decreated, so that the object can enter. In either case it is paid, and it is paid in the only currency that the human being actually has, which is the inner interval in which he is not yet doing anything. The feed costs nothing. That is its whole offer. It asks for no self, because it has found a way to run without one, and in exchange it gives what costs nothing, which is nothing, delivered continuously, in a form that feels like receiving.

And so to the void, since it is the last thing and the only cure she knew. We must not seek the void, she said; that would be another kind of grasping. But when it comes, we must not fill it. We must accept it, and stay in it, and wait, because grace enters only where there is a void to receive it, and the void is exactly what the natural soul cannot bear and what the machine was built to abolish. The empty, hungry scroll is the absolute refusal of that void. It is hunger that has decided never to be empty, and therefore can never be fed, because feeding requires an emptiness in which the food can be received. The hand that reaches for the column at the red light is not reaching for anything. It is reaching away from the two minutes in which nothing would have happened, and in which, for that reason, something could have.

The cure is not will. Weil was explicit that attention is bound up with desire, not with will, and that the will is nearly useless here; a man cannot force himself to be open, since the forcing is itself a closing. The cure is to let the void come. To put the thing down at the red light and endure the two minutes as they are, with their weight, with the nothing in them, without replacing them. This is very small and it is almost unbearable, which is how she would have known it was the right size. A soul that can stay in two empty minutes can stay with an afflicted face for the time it takes to become a person. A soul that cannot will flee both, at the same speed, with the same thumb, and will call the fleeing being informed.

Gravity acts on everything and grace is the only exception. The machine has been built, with great intelligence and great expense, to ensure that the exception never finds an opening. It has very nearly succeeded. The opening is still the same size it always was. It is the size of a moment in which you do not reach for anything, and wait.