may sarton, journal of solitude (part II)
Simone Weil says, “Absolute attention is prayer.” And the more I have thought about this over the years, the truer it is for me. I have used the sentence often in talking about poetry to students, to suggest that if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is “given,” and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self.
There are times when I find myself going back to Louis Lavelle’s Le Mal et la Souffrance (...) that has nourished and reassured me in my own belief that solitude is one of the ways toward communion. He says:
“We sense that there can be no true communion between human beings until they have in fact become beings: for to be able to give oneself one must have taken possession of oneself in that painful solitude outside of which nothing belongs to us and we have nothing to give.… And one might even say that I begin to communicate with others as soon as I begin to communicate with myself. (...) Solitude is to feel the presence in oneself of a power that cannot act, but which, as soon as it is able to, obliges me to realize myself by multiplying my relations with myself and with all human beings. “
(...) for it is only through this communion that each consciousness will discover the essence of its destiny which is not to perceive things or to dominate them, but is to live, and that means to find outside itself other consciousnesses from which it never stops receiving and to whom it never stops giving in an uninterrupted circuit of light, of joy and of love, which is the only law of the spiritual universe.
I have been pondering a passage from Jung. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”