I fear that today it is rather toward the Babylonian conception that we’re moving, in other words playing games rather than making art. I wonder how many mathematicians today see mathematics as a process aimed at purifying the soul and “imitating God”?
~ Letter from Simone Weil to her brother André, March 1940
1.
Photo: summer holiday, Belgium, 1922,
André aged sixteen, you thirteen.
The two of you are seated
at an outside table. Before André isl
an open book. He smiles patiently, almost
indulgent, no doubt eager to re-enter
whatever vast complexities lie
unbounded before him.
Your smile is more generous, more full. Not
the doleful, into-the-distance gaze for which
you’ll be better known later on. But what picture
can hope, in only two dimensions and
the finite shades of visible light,
to capture these vast incommensurables
of your self: the razor intellect, that
Alexandrian library of a mind, that despair
for the future (Thank you for saying,
you later write, that the future needs me, but,
as I see it, it doesn’t...any more than
I need it), yet to temper all that with your
exuberant, affectionate heart?
The daughter and sister who bursts
in delight in letters addressed to
your darlings? No chance.
You have no book before you.
Perhaps the world and its people are
already your book. Perhaps the many
labyrinthine worlds opened up in
conversation with André are
sufficient to the day. But you
look content. The world needs to see
that this also is you. Simone, on
vacation. Simone content, satisfied
in her world.
2.
Simone,
here’s a problem to share for André’s
imprisoned amusement:
The mathematician, seeking
elegance and completeness, finds
reality comprised of many incommensurable things.
This baffles her and opens up to her a world
of wonder, worship and questioning. She is
unmoored yet in awe.
The tyrant, meanwhile, finds a reality comprised of
truths consistently inconvenient, unfavorable,
simple and naked in their abject, negating fact,
and so, awkward in this light, he proclaims
wildly incommensurable truths to
a people who are powerless to protest his word.
Here is the question for you, and for André:
what, in this world, can the mathematician do?
And who can tell tyrants the truth?
3.
André, though you indulge
Simone’s request to explain your now-
famous conjectures to her,
you insist she’ll reach
a point in her reading at which
she no longer understands.
No danger to Simone. She already
knows the place of incomprehension,
began with that as first principle.
Enter the void of your own abjection, she’d say.
Seek truth, but first face
the void, cold and dark but safe
from the gravity of the fallen self,
the fallen cosmos, and find
freedom in emptiness, in
desolation, like a hand
flying out into the vacuum of space
to find Grace like out-stretched fingers
stringing together the fractured whole.
4.
Simone, you saw
the Babylonian games before the rest.
Though you delighted in every
question you heard, it was not
the uniform mechanism of Babel
that appealed, or the mind at play for sheer
display of talent. It was the real
behind each real number, each
unknown that set you going, the souls
stationed at the factory beside you,
the victims of the Empire’s Math.
5.
In the end, what could you do?
For here was a final paradox:
Love bidding you welcome, and you
eager to accept, and yet
determined not, in the face of such hate,
to ever sit and eat.
6.
Incommensurable as gravity and grace,
you sit smiling, sit starving.
One day, you say to André, perhaps
in a thousand years, we might
roam about again freely sharing truth,
unconstrained by Imperial games.
How heavy the wait, how light the grace.
Simone, you are smiling now.
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