Wild Kindly Things – a look at My Weil by Lars Iyer
Lars Iyer’s My Weil opens “Monday Night.” It opens, “The postgraduate social.” And omg it opens, “Room-temperature prosecco.”
Really that’s all you need for you to know whether you want to continue or not, right? And yes, I wanted to continue. I was reading the ARC (advanced reading copy) sent me by Melville House but it’s available August 29. As you know, I’m a horrible book reviewer, but I loved this book. It’s both strangely uplifting and depressing. As usual, I’ll cheat and quote the publisher:
“The narrator, Donny, who was brought up in care and is psychologically fragile, and deeply disturbed by the poverty of his adopted city, gradually falls in love in Simone. But will his love be requited? Will Simone be able to save the souls of her new friends and Manchester itself from apocalypse?”
And Simone Weil stands in for the philosopher here, and we wonder if her philosophy is the thing that could save us all from the apocalypse.
I read it for the language, which reminded me of Joyce and Woolf and well pretty much all the female experimental writers that I usually read and of whom I am deeply fond. I read it as someone who works with the houseless etc in an inner city library. I read it as someone who hinged her book Rumi and the Red Handbag on some thoughts of Simone Weil and whose main character in that book was called Ingrid-Simone. (or I.s. for short). I read it and then went back to The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretsky. (Weil crops up here from time to time).
I’m late to the Lars Iyer love-in, but will for sure seek out his trilogy, Spurious, Dogma, Exodus. In My Weil, Ismail is “filming the heavens,” and the characters, PhD students in the Centre for Disaster Studies are specialists in “drunken philosophy.” Ismail is really trying to “capture the beauty of drunkenness.” Or maybe he’s being a “parasite, like all artists” stealing the souls of his friends. They all want saving, and when Simone helper of homeless people arrives, they ask her, “who will help us?” She responds: “We help ourselves by helping.”
But Ismail wants “to make an ordinary epic” and “the story of nothing in particular.” And that’s something, too. Meanwhile, how does Simone go on? “How do you cope?” “How do you go on knowing that there’s such suffering?” asks one character. And another says, “Simone, you actually give a fuck…It’s stirring.” Marcie, says, “Sometimes I want to do wild kindly things. But I only want to do them. I don’t actually do them.”
There’s a lot of the book I’d love to extract quotations from because it gives you so much to think about. (You’re just gonna have to buy the book and underline your own stuff). But there’s this bit about contradictions near the beginning of the book, and it sold me on it, so I want to share it here. On the cover of Simone’s notebook is the word “Contradictions.” And hell couldn’t all of us have had that on our journals these past years? One character says to Simone that she doesn’t really explain anything. “You’re just adding contradiction to contradiction.” And the answer by Simone is: “You’re supposed to contemplate the contradictions, not try and solve them.” Dialectics, amiright.
You don’t have to be a big reader of philosophy or Simone Weil to enjoy this book. It’s really quite perfectly of our time. For me, it would send me off into reveries about the past few years, about my existence now, about houselessness, is-ness. I thought about what it means to do wild kindly things in our everyday lives and how when you do them you can’t talk about them or maybe you oughtn’t though some do. The weirdness of any of that. That there is so much that needs kindness and how you don’t even need to be kind to do a lot of it. What even really is kindness? and compassion? What are the contradictions in a life devoted to being wildly kind? Well, many. That much I know. That much I can divulge.
Meanwhile, if you know what it is to drink room-temp prosecco, you know.
Meanwhile, a reminder that my Beauty School is still going….and if you’d like to subscribe for a Monday morning prompt in your inbox….here are the coordinates.
