"Emptiness, silence, heat, whiteness, wait, the light goes down, all grows dark together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, the light goes out, all vanished."
"We aren’t built to live in the hither side of being, though. Once you open up, or are opened up, to literal senselessness, shutting down input from your own body and emotive mind, it eats through the subterraneum of your psyche like karst through limestone. It wells out from what should be a warm smile; any path you try follow upwards or out collapses back into it. It hollows out pockets inside you where pain lays down land mines. Its sinkholes swallow whole neighborhoods of your life overnight."
for weil, attention is the decreative release of self to receive the world in all its reality. paradoxically, this (passive) letting go of self and accompanying control is simultaneously a “creative” action: attention sees what is invisible (as the good samaritan saw the bleeding, anonymous, dirty man in the ditch) and hears what has been deprived of a voice because the din and smog generated from our maintenance of control has finally cleared.
a. rebecca rozelle-stone and lucian stone, simone weil and theology
Just because we know what’s wrong does not mean that we will be able to deal with it. On the contrary, one of the primary symptoms of depression is that what you need to do is precisely what you cannot do, at least not alone and on your own. Or in the plain words of Ann Cvetkovich: “Saying that capitalism (or colonialism or racism) is the problem does not help me get up in the morning.” Also, there is no reason to believe that abolishing private property ownership, or realizing a global and absolute cancellation of private debt, will relieve the suffering of depressed people with a single stroke, as if by magic. But, in an act of speculation, I am tempted to say that revolution is the best antidepressant there is, it makes for a better world, true happiness. But, alas!, in order to do revolution, we need to get out of bed. A real dialectical catch-22 of depression.
