Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness

Oct.6, Monday

Chilliest night so far. In the wee hours I put my winter undershirt on. On the roof my thermometer registers 69 degrees Fahrenheit. Neville is up and about in these wee hours; we greet and pass on, understanding this isn’t palaver time.

WEIL ON AFFLICTION, RISK
At our morning reflection Neville reads a passage from Simone Weil’s essay, “Human Personality.” It’s relevant to Voices:

Affliction is by its nature inarticulate. The afflicted silently beseech to be given the words to express themselves. There are times when they are given none; but there are also times when they are given words, but ill-chosen ones, because those who choose them know nothing of the affliction they would interpret.

“Usually, they are far removed from it by the circumstances of their life; but even if they are in close contact with it or have recently experienced it themselves, they are still remote from it because they put it at a distance at the first possible moment.”

“Thought revolts from contemplating affliction, to the same degree that living flesh recoils from death. A stag advancing voluntarily step by step to offer itself to the teeth of a pack of hounds is about as probable as an act of attention directed towards a real affliction, which is close at hand, on the part of a mind which is free to avoid it.”

The first sentence of this essay is, “‘You do not interest me.’ No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice.” Daily, by this reckoning, I offend against justice!

A day or two ago Neville quoted Weil: “Risk is a need of the soul.” The extreme preoccupation with ’security’ found in US culture, the matrix of the US security state, surely helps erode our soul. My life in the States, in Syracuse, entails so little risk. To what extent are the few civil disobedience actions I’ve done just the soul’s way of saying, “serve me some risk, please?”

Much of my travel over the years has been my way of educating myself about the human condition Much of it, especially the hitchhiking and the passing through war zones, surely is my soul’s recurring plea, “risk, please.” Besides this, the quest to understand the human condition is really a quest for self-knowledge. First, it’s a way to see how one responds in the face of what the other endures. Second, from the Gaian perspective, there is no “other” and what we see and experience as we roam helps us understand the greater whole of which we are only a part. It’s like our fingers checking out every part of our bodies.