Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:00.628)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Cynthia Wallace, the Associate Professor in English at University of Saskatchewan, and we're talking about her book, The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil, Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion, with a beautiful cover, love that. Dr. Wallace, wonderful to have you on today.
Cindy Wallace (00:23.896)
thanks. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited.
PJ (00:27.858)
Dr. Wallace, tell me why this book?
Cindy Wallace (00:31.832)
Yeah, so there's a story there that I'll maybe tell it. I was in grad school at Loyola University, Chicago, you know, almost two decades ago, starting out. And I was reading, I was studying decolonizing and post -colonial literatures. I was studying feminism. I was studying writers of color. I was studying literary ethics and
there was this excitement at sort of the turn of the century in literary studies about ethics. We call it the ethical turn. I was reading a lot of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. I don't know if, have you talked about Levinas with people ever on the podcast before? yeah, yeah. So this idea.
PJ (01:16.724)
Maybe just in passing, but I am familiar with Levinas. Yeah, I Only read him though. So I always call them Levinas and I I know I've talked about them on the podcast because someone's like, it's Levinas I was like, okay. Anyways, sorry Emmanuel Levinas. Yes
Cindy Wallace (01:28.568)
That's excellent. That's excellent. I always, you can tell a person who reads a lot by their mispronunciations. I feel like it's kind of a badge because it's like, you learn this by the hard work of reading it in isolation, right? So there's something real, like there's an honor in the mispronunciation. I need an end.
PJ (01:41.172)
Yes.
PJ (01:44.82)
That's very kind of you. It might be a badge of shame, but we'll go with the honor. Thank you.
Cindy Wallace (01:49.368)
I think that's the right take. I always tell my students, you don't know until you know, and then you do. Yeah, so I was thinking a lot about ethics. And I, at the same time that I was doing my English PhD, my husband was studying theology. And he did a class where they read Simone Bay. And then I happened to be reading this feminist philosopher and poet, Adrienne Rich,
PJ (01:56.756)
That's right.
Cindy Wallace (02:19.8)
and finding Ve in her work in the book of women born and thinking what on earth is this like cruciform, sacrificially motivated, French philosopher doing in one of the key texts of radical feminism. And so when I finally got the time, I sat down with Ve's book, Waiting for God.
PJ (02:38.93)
Hmm.
Cindy Wallace (02:46.018)
which Vade, to be clear, did not write as a book called Waiting for God. Her friends after her death collected letters and essays and published it under that title. And I read it and I write about this a little bit at the very end of this book, but I read it and I just I found it so compelling and still so perplexing. And and the kind of idea that that there could be a kind of championing of self -sacrifice in a modern age is really
It's kind of surprising. And the number of people, as I continued to read over the years, who I recognized had been influenced by VEI, it just grew and grew and grew. So it finally got to the point that I realized I have to take this question seriously. Why are so many writers and especially writers of poetry and fiction and creative nonfiction, why are they so compelled by VEI? What's going on here?
And that was the kind of impetus that began, I let myself really begin to ask the question and do the deep dive.
PJ (03:52.18)
Hmm. So your husband, was he going to Loyola, Chicago? Is that how you guys met?
Cindy Wallace (03:57.592)
He was. Yeah, he was. No, we met an undergraduate. We were sweet little undergraduate babies who met in an honor seminar that was this beautiful integration of philosophy and humanities and history. And we got to know each other in a beautiful group of very quirky young Christian kids and were married when we were very young. So we did graduate school together.
PJ (04:27.162)
that's awesome. So, but then you went to, so you went to Loyola together. I've had, so maybe like I've had Paul Moser on the show. So probably your husband had him and I had, as you're talking about this ethics of film or ethics of literature, did you have Robert Pippen? Okay. Yes. Yeah. So I, he's been on the show twice. So that's anyways, I was like, Loyola Chicago. Like I know.
Cindy Wallace (04:38.26)
yeah.
Cindy Wallace (04:47.896)
No, but I know the name.
PJ (04:56.596)
Anyways, that's awesome. So you mentioned a little bit about like the perplexing nature and one of the things that really
You mentioned in the book, the this idea of literary afterlives and that she has had a profound influence in many ways, if I read you correctly, not in her completion, but in her contradictions, right? Like that's kind of how biographies are written about her. She's a very contradictory character and that she leaves things very open ended. Can you speak to that contradictory nature? What are some of her contradictions and why is that valuable versus like?
Cindy Wallace (05:28.024)
This is it. This is it.
PJ (05:36.82)
You know, I was really hoping that I could just like read her and just have all my answers.
Cindy Wallace (05:40.664)
Yeah, there's no systematic Simone Vey, right? You don't get to sit down and have like a concise and convenient summary in any of her work. Although I should say that the very brief introduction to Simone Vey was just released this year. And so if anybody wants the very brief introduction, it is at long last available. But Simone Vey's contradictions, I do think, are a large part of what have been.
PJ (05:58.994)
Mm.
Cindy Wallace (06:09.356)
drawn so many people to her. So she was, and we often get these lists in her biographies, right? So she was for a while a pacifist, but then she went as a volunteer with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Or she was born into an agnostic Jewish family, but then she became compelled by Catholic Christianity. She was...
deeply suspicious of the imagination as a kind of false consolation, you know, where she thought like, we need to be able to contemplate the void. We need to be able to contemplate reality. We can't just distract ourselves with happy endings. But she loved literature. She loved the classics. She loved art. She was very, very demanding in her ethics. This is something else people talk a lot about. Like it's almost an impossible rigor.
But when you read her biography, she was also very relational. Like she was very connected to friends. She wrote lots and lots of letters. She visited people. And so there are all of these contradictions where you think like, she's a Marxist, but she's not, she's not that kind of Marxist, right? She's, she's like, like people love Vey on all sides of the political spectrum and they read her in really contradictory ways. And I think that part of that,
I mean, in part, she was influenced by these Greek ideas of balance. And she didn't think that some sort of like average or mean was generally the answer. She thought that trying out the opposite extremes of a thought was the way to wisdom. So make a claim and then make the opposite claim and explore each of them as far as they can go, rather than trying to find some sort of mediocre in -between place.
And I think this is part of what draws so many people to her, not just that they see themselves in her, but they get kind of compelled by the contradictions and want to puzzle them out.
PJ (08:13.876)
It kind of reminds me like on the internet, there's no way to, I grew a Twitter account from to 6 ,000 people in three months organically. And all I did was ask questions. And there are a few things that get people more interactive than being like, if you give them two contradictions and you're like, well, how can these work together? And then everyone's like, well, I have an answer. And that's just like a natural human thing. Like,
If you want help, don't ask for help. Do it the wrong way right in front of someone who knows how to do it the right way, right? It's a guy...
Cindy Wallace (08:46.68)
That's so true, that's so true. Yup, yup.
PJ (08:50.866)
It's kind of, anyways, a little aside there. And you kind of, it's interesting you play into this with Annie Dillard, that part in particular, you talk about, you have Simone Vey, and I think it was a biographer or reporter who went to see Annie Dillard, and Simone Vey is the gaunt aesthetic, and then you have Annie Dillard as like, not that. And he was expecting someone like that.
And you kind of play with those contradictions there as well, is that, as you mentioned, like, there's a wide variety on the political spectrum. Like you, you have this gaunt Roman Catholic mystic, if you wanted to make it really simple, and then it just doesn't, it doesn't work out that way. She's not followed by gaunt mystics, you know, she's followed by people who are very much in tune with life. What do you think is that kind of vitality that you see in her work that it kind of...
continues to draw people in. She's not just this crazy -eyed mystic, if you could put that way.
Cindy Wallace (09:57.72)
Yeah, that's great. It was, I think it was Philip Yancey who was interviewing Annie Dillard. And yeah, and he just had this like, what's she gonna be like? And Annie Dillard is famously like, she loves softball. Like she's like, she's a big practical joker. Simone Vey though, similarly, like she, there's a story of her where she went down into the mines and there was one of those like, is it like a pneumatic like.
I don't know, like one of these huge kind of drill machines and she wanted to try it and she didn't want to stop. And we just want, like she wanted, she had a thirst for life. And I think that's part of what compels people to her. There is a huge debate in Simone Vey's reception about whether we should consider her life when we think about her written work. And there was, she had, and I write about this in the book, she had a huge concern.
PJ (10:48.882)
Mm.
Cindy Wallace (10:53.72)
that people would look at her brief life, she died when she was 34, and that that life would overshadow her work as a political philosopher in particular. But I'm compelled by the more recent argument that scholars are making that Simonevay's life is really manifested by her effort to, or her thought is really manifested by her effort to embody that thought. And so,
So even very recently in the book, Simonevay's Political Philosophy, Benjamin Davis writes about, I love this framing, so he writes about her essays and then he writes about the things that she did kind of in the same, in the same years that she was writing particular essays. Like she took a leave of absence from being a school teacher in order to work in factories. And he says that that was like her essaying, like the French verb to try, which is where we get the word essay from.
So she writes these essays about the dignity of labor, for example, and then she tries them out through lived experience. And I think too, that's part of what people find so compelling is there's an integrity between what she says and what she does. And I think that in our contemporary moment, I think a lot of people are continuing to long even more so than maybe 70 years ago. For example,
examples of people who do what they say, where there is a kind of coherence between their thought and their life. And we're wondering what that looks like in our moment. And I think that's what a lot of poets in particular are interested in, but also Annie Dillard and also Adrienne Rich and also Mary Gordon and many, many, many other writers who are engaging with based thought.
PJ (12:24.466)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (12:44.245)
Do you think it's that focus on embodiment that makes her work so interdisciplinary? I mean, you mentioned it covers a wide range of subject matter.
Cindy Wallace (12:53.432)
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I think that the embodiment is a key piece there. There's one way of reading Vaye that actually reads her is very disembodied and sort of like metaphysically like living up here kind of in the platonic forms kind of realm. But she was deeply concerned with the body. In fact, Vaye's kind of fundamental ethics is not just...
in the question, tell me what you're going through, which is a question that's about a practice of attention. And that's something she's really widely known for. But her ethics are also really evident in the fundamental question of feeding people who are hungry. So she argues that the base of human obligation, the base of our ethics and politics is in the fact that when a person is hungry, they ought to be fed.
And so we have basic human needs in our bodies. And then we have obligations to fulfill them. And those can be interpersonal, but they can also be about how we structure society so everyone has enough food. And I think that that fundamental role of the body in her thought connects her political philosophy. And then it connects, it pulls in her interest in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. And it pulls in kind of a lot of her ideas about what it.
what it looks like to care for each other in a kind of ethical stance. And it's engaged in her ideas of prayer. Like there are so many layers that come together in that place of the body. So I think you're right that the body is a place that's pulling a lot of that interdisciplinary interests together.
PJ (14:39.028)
And my audience might be annoyed by this at this point, but I do the majority of the cooking. So you're definitely speaking to like to me personally here. Like I feel that. And I just had Dr. Nikki Singh on to talk about Sikhi or Sikhism and their form of one of their major forms of worship is to feed people like to feed the poor to feed. And it's one of the most.
Cindy Wallace (15:04.598)
Mmm.
PJ (15:07.688)
appealing parts of that religion.
PJ (15:16.34)
And that's really interesting to me. I was introduced to Simone Weil as that way of turning on its head, the idea that it was from a political philosophy.
that instead of defining things by rights, we define things by our obligations to others. And this seems to be, do you think their idea of obligation stems from this feeding or that feeding stems from her ideas of obligation? Or is that just a bad question? That's okay too.
Cindy Wallace (15:34.592)
Mm -hmm.
Cindy Wallace (15:46.744)
No, no, that's great. I, I, the, the idea of Sikhism and the, and the, feeding of others. I don't know a lot about that, but I read the memoir, See No Stranger. Have you read this by Valerie Core? And that comes up again and again and again. and, yeah, so I definitely see the resonance. And Vey herself was really interested in the prevalence of the need to fill other people's hunger in.
PJ (16:00.5)
No.
Cindy Wallace (16:16.6)
the world traditions. So she was interested in locating that. So she in her book, The Need for Roots, which she wrote in the last year of her life, that's where we see that rights versus obligations discussion. And she roots it in the story from Matthew 25 of the sheep and the goats. And where in the parable, he says, you know, you, I was hungry and you didn't feed me.
But she also roots it in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And so she's saying there's this ancient tradition. We see it in Christianity. We see it in other world traditions. And we also see it in our common sense. When a person is hungry, they need to be fed. And if we see a hungry person and we don't feed them, we are not fulfilling our obligations. So I think she does build out this idea of obligations rather than rights from.
the core concept of hunger. I think hunger is first. So she starts with the body and its needs. And then the idea of obligations follow from that. But again, she's sourcing it in all sorts of places.
PJ (17:25.236)
what? Thank you. That's a great answer for a very poorly worded question, like all over the place question. So thank you. and I did, I, I wrote this down. You even have it in your bio, from your university that you focus on attention. And, can you talk a little bit about what does it mean to have an ethics of attention and specifically, what does it mean to have a deficit of attention or a surplus?
Cindy Wallace (17:50.104)
Yeah, yeah, such a question. The question for our time, right? Like this is the question, my friend. Yeah, I came to this question, as I said, before I came to VEI, and then VEI is one of the people who's really opened it up for me. So in our moment, as all of us know, we are struggling in an attention economy where our attention has been commodified.
PJ (17:53.108)
Hahaha!
Cindy Wallace (18:18.84)
And we are struggling in a culture where we seem to be really divided in our attention, overwhelmed in our practices of attention. We have lots and lots of discussions of whether attention deficits are based on our kind of neural structures or whether they're based on our context or whether there's some combination. And all of that is in play.
At the same time, Simone Weil, who predates us, you know, she lived from 1909 to 1934, she's arguing that the most radical thing a person can do is pay attention to another who is suffering. But she argues famously in her essay about school studies that we practice that capacity in lots of places.
So we practice that capacity when we do our geometry homework. That's her kind of central example. We practice that capacity when we kind of discipline our attention to attend to the beauty of the natural world. We practice that capacity in prayer. And all of these kind of practices of attention toward an other or toward a divine other or toward just like paying attention to...
the mundane tasks of our schoolwork. They build that capacity in us that then translates into those other categories. And so she's arguing that attention has a kind of intellectual but also ethical and spiritual reality. I find that deeply compelling as I find my own attention divided by, you know, networked public culture is what we used to call it, but I don't know what we call it now. Like,
Web 2 .0 is what I studied in graduate school and wrote, I wrote a paper in graduate school on Emmanuel Levinas and the ethics of Facebook in Facebook's early days. And the question, because Levinas argues, right, that we need face -to -face encounters in order to be confronted with our responsibility. So his is also an ethics of attention. And.
PJ (20:36.98)
I've been seeing articles about Web 3 .0 for the last couple years. You're right. Yeah, I who knows? They're like, it's coming. But that was two years ago. I don't know if it's here. Yeah.
Cindy Wallace (20:39.65)
Is it 3 .0 now? Is it 4 .0? Who can say? Who knows? Who knows, right?
But it feels urgent and it feels urgent to me as an individual and it feels urgent to me as a teacher and it feels urgent to me as a parent. What does it look like to raise children who aren't disciplined in practices of constantly fractured attention from the get -go? I'm turning 41 this summer. I am the last generation that had a childhood without smartphones, right? Like they only came about in my early adulthood.
So I think a lot about what does it look like to pay that kind of attention. And with VEI, and all of these are the right, I'm a lit professor, right? And I think that one of the most potent places we can practice is by doing things like reading poetry, which slows us down and demands something of us. And in that kind of demand, because it's hard and it makes us do one thing at a time and it makes us really think and engage.
I think that that can be one of those kind of exercise grounds for our capacities to attend.
PJ (21:54.196)
Even as you're talking about poetry and the internet, poetry demands that we pay attention to the richness of the language. And the internet, as I think about the way it uses language, they are signposts to immediate gratification, right? Like you see a word and it's supposed to evoke immediate response rather than you thinking about the word and its complications.
PJ (22:22.1)
Sorry, the example I'm thinking of is probably not the right one for right now. But the... As we think about that...
PJ (22:36.148)
Can you give some more examples of poetry forcing us to slow down? And maybe that can even tie in with the way that people use Simone Wey in their poetry.
Cindy Wallace (22:46.328)
Yeah, that's great. The media studies scholar Douglas Rushkoff, have you encountered his work? He has a book called Team Human. He's the one who made that documentary back in the day called Merchants of Cool. It was about how big names kind of capitalized on like kid youth trends and then sold them back to us. He argues in his book Team Human that what we see in our current
PJ (22:53.586)
No.
Cindy Wallace (23:15.608)
social media landscape is mimetic warfare, like memes, and they hijack our capacities to really attend and they just go straight for the limbic system and like make us angry and that's what gets clicks and so it's algorithmically driven, hey. Poetry, yeah, yeah.
PJ (23:20.084)
Yes.
PJ (23:28.7)
Yes.
So just to give you my day job, I'm a digital marketer. So this is my world. Sorry, I just wanted to say like that's what I have not heard of. I'll have to write his name down, but I've not heard of that media studies professor, but yes, very familiar with the way that we hijack people to make things happen. So anyways, continue.
Cindy Wallace (23:55.33)
Yep, yep, yep. It's strategic, right? So poetry, it's not like that. And some, I mean, some poetry is, right? And then to go back, I mean, back to media studies, the medium is the message sometimes, right? So we see increasingly, you know, we see Instagram poetry where the poetry is constrained by the size of the screen and that shapes what we write. And there's some really lovely poetry being written in those spaces.
But in much of the tradition of poetic writing, it does ask something for us that doesn't just let us have a knee -jerk response. It asks us to sit with ambiguity and to sit with kind of multiple possible interpretations. So most, I think one of the classic ways poets do this is by splitting a sentence over a line.
which is called Enjambment, taking us all back to Comp 101. But when poets do that, you read the sentence as you continue, but you also read each line on its own. And that can give us, you know, a double meaning where there's the meaning if you only stop at the end of the line and there's the meaning that is accruing across the lines. And I think that one of the remarkable things about Simone Veil's legacy,
PJ (24:55.572)
Hahaha
Cindy Wallace (25:19.992)
is how many poets have decided to engage with her ideas about attention, in part through writing these kind of verse biographies of her life that end up enacting a lot of her ideas. And so we have a lot of poems about Simonevay written over the last several decades. And in some cases, as I write about in the book, whole books about Simonevay of poems or whole
sequences of poems about her life that really function as biographies. But what those poems do is invite us into that practice of attention. And it's a practice that's happening at a couple levels, right? Because we're paying attention to Simone Vey's life story. We're paying attention to the ways that she was wounded, just like all of us are wounded. But we're also paying attention to the language and the ambiguity and the paradox, which I would say is present in all of life, but we forget about it a lot of time.
So poetry reminds us.
PJ (26:17.3)
Yeah.
Okay, forgive me. So did you say there were four levels?
Cindy Wallace (26:24.344)
I don't know if I said a number. Several.
PJ (26:27.252)
Okay, several. Okay, never mind. I was waiting for the fourth one and I was like, I didn't get it. I was like, okay. And so there's that idea of tension, but you also mentioned this idea of de -creation in the poetry. Is there a link between attention and de -creation or is that kind of a separate idea?
Cindy Wallace (26:33.944)
No, no.
Cindy Wallace (26:51.96)
that they're very linked. So for Vé, decreation is this kind of idea, and it's a very contested idea. And I think this is one of the aspects of Vé's thought in life that people find most challenging. So it's the idea that when we truly pay attention to another, particularly in the case of a suffering other human, but also even just in the case of reading a poem, there is an element of self -sacrifice involved.
because we're emptying ourselves to make room to receive whatever that other may be. And so we have to let go of preconceived notions. We have to let go of our kind of egotistical sort of self -centeredness, which she kind of characterizes humans as deeply embedded in our egotistical self -centeredness. And in order to make space, I mean, she patterns this in a lot of her later thought after Christ on the Cross, where,
or Christ in the incarnation emptying himself of divinity to join humanity. On the one hand, a lot of people actually find that this is kind of true. Like for me to really pay attention and understand a poem, I have to give it my time. I have to let go of prior notions. For me to really understand what a suffering person is going through,
I have to say, what are you going through? And then really listen in a way that doesn't maybe align with my expectations and maybe doesn't align with what I really want to be doing at that moment, right? But what people find troubling in Ve is that in her own life, this ethical commitment seems to have perhaps kind of precipitated her early death because...
when she was sick with tuberculosis in her last year. She was committed to not eating more than people at the war front of World War II were eating. And at the time, the only treatment for tuberculosis was really rich nutrition and rest. So if you didn't choose to partake of that rich nutrition, you died. And she died. And so there's a question of, was it suicide? Was it self -sacrifice? Was this her embodying?
Cindy Wallace (29:17.464)
her ethic to a kind of hyperbolic extreme, or was this sort of just kind of the way that life is sometimes sad and tragic and she didn't really intend that outcome? Her family didn't think that that was her intended outcome. And so there's a debate about that. And people worry if you take this idea of decreation as a kind of self -sacrifice to its absolute literal end, could it be self -destructive in a way that isn't?
really good for people. And that's actually what a lot of philosophers and writers and especially feminists have grappled with in the years since Faye's death.
PJ (29:56.052)
And there's a real...
connection here with the Christian tradition and the idea that you have to submit yourself in humility before you're exalted and that those who are proud will be abased or even to go to Proverbs the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom this idea of and there's something very similar there about this like choice to go down to go up and it seems that the Christian
Faith is very evident and very well worked out in philosophical ways is very very evident in her thought Is that would that be fair to say am I tracking with that?
Cindy Wallace (30:40.152)
I mean, I think so. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it helps to remember it like Simone Weil is never she never just lets us think like she's this thing, right? So like some of her so so she was very, very attracted to Christianity in the last years of her life. She had a series of mystical experiences and says that she hadn't read the mystics beforehand. And so which which gives further credence to the fact that these were genuine experiences.
PJ (31:03.09)
Mm.
Cindy Wallace (31:09.464)
But her commitment to the lowly being lifted is just as rooted in the fact that she was a labor organizer in her early 20s, as it is in the fact that she became really attracted to a very cruciform mode of Christianity. So like, it's the both and again, where nobody really knows how to reconcile, like, they the kind of critical quasi Marxist and they the sort of like,
PJ (31:18.898)
Mm.
Cindy Wallace (31:39.254)
whenever I think of the crucifixion, I commit the sense of envy, kind of a thinker. Like these two sides of her, they work. I don't think they're in opposition, but they're in a really creative tension, especially in terms of people who read her later and are maybe more attracted to one side of that than the other.
PJ (32:01.428)
And you kind of mentioned like her reception and we're 30 minutes in and we've mainly talked about Simone Vey and The book is the literary afterlife. So thank you for your patience. Like hopefully get there. You've talked a little bit about the hagiographical writing style and the non -hagiographical style and When you talk about these different receptions, can you tell us a little bit about how some people have bracketed the religious?
Cindy Wallace (32:08.92)
I'm going to go to bed.
PJ (32:30.868)
and while other people have embraced the religious. How has that trend gone in terms of this reception?
Cindy Wallace (32:36.856)
Yeah, it's fascinating to read historically because you do see people who read her writing about politics tend to see like, someone who is a political philosopher. And then people who start, like if you start by reading Gravity and Grace, which isn't even a book that she wrote at all, it's a book that her friend after her death took like little sayings out of her notebooks and pieced together. You read it and you're like, whoa, this lady's like.
all over the map with this kind of like mystical, heady, like metaphysical something. And they're, they just seem like different people. And so depending on who introduces you to Ve and which texts you start by reading, you get a very different sense. Even if you read a biography, her biographers present very different constructions of the woman. And, and so yeah, in the years since,
There have been people who are kind of embarrassed by her religious turn and who just don't really talk about it. And that's kind of okay, I guess. Like they're interested in other things. And then there are people who are kind of really interested in her religious turn, but who completely forget that she was like going to union meetings all the time in her earlier 20s and that she was really, really concerned with the building of a just society.
And that that was a huge component of her thinking that doesn't really align with most of our conceptions of political systems, at least in North America in 2024. So she's not tidy, right? There's not an easy way to make her fit into what we want, which is exactly what she writes about in her ethics, right? That like what friendship looks like is to let the other person be different.
from us and be different from what we want them to be.
PJ (34:38.26)
Which is why you brought up at the beginning, Levinas, this idea of the fully other, we see that in other philosophical writings, but for Levinas, that's the thing, and that makes total sense. So tell me a little bit about the selection process, and I know that's.
Cindy Wallace (34:41.976)
Yeah. Yeah.
Cindy Wallace (34:47.904)
Yep, precisely. Yeah.
PJ (34:57.138)
Sometimes a difficult question. Sometimes it's easy. You picked Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, and Mary Gordon. I think I got that last one right. Yes. Why those three writers? And then you work in the poets afterwards.
Cindy Wallace (35:05.944)
You did? Yeah, good.
Cindy Wallace (35:15.766)
Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's partly a process of prior knowledge and prior interest. So my first book is called Of Women Born, A Literary Ethics of Suffering. And in that book, I really am interested in this question of the ethics of attention more broadly. And I studied Adrienne Rich pretty carefully for that. I learned that she's called Adrienne like the A is in hat.
by going to the archives and reading her say in an interview, you pronounce the A in my name like hat. I never had heard anybody say Adrienne. Yeah. I had never heard anybody call her that until I read her own claim in the archives. So Adrienne Rich was one of the more perplexing interlocutors for me because she's just like this radical feminist who had no interest in Christianity.
PJ (35:52.39)
Adrien. Yes, thank you.
Cindy Wallace (36:14.968)
but a deep interest in justice and ethics and attention as a poet. And so I knew that I would want to write about Rich. And the chapter on Rich is the chapter where I really got to do a bit of a dive into reception history and figure out how did Vaye's work spread around? How did it reach all of these people? Where did they find it? Like, where did it come from? Which is a really interesting story to me.
and has a lot, I think, to do with post -World War II kind of resistance to just this cult of comfort and positivity. Like, Ve really tells the truth about how bad things are, even as she calls us to recognize the world's beauty. But then Annie Dillard, I had loved Annie Dillard since, you know, undergraduate studies where I wanted to be Annie Dillard.
PJ (37:13.492)
Hahaha!
Cindy Wallace (37:14.764)
I mean, not in every way, but you know, you read Pilgrim of Tinker Creek as a 20 year old and you're like, what happened to me? This is, I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to be this. And when I first read Waiting for God, I saw like the margins of my copy of Waiting for God are just Annie Dillard? Annie Dillard? I just saw her all over the place, especially in her book, Holy the Firm.
But I also loved her 1999 book for the time being. If you know these books, you know what a weird 20 -year -old I was. But I loved, I love these books. I was thinking a lot about the problem of evil. And they and Dillard really, really struggle with that together. But then I also like I studied Catholic writers as part of my graduate education is a...
quirky graduate education. So I'm studying feminism and I'm studying decolonizing stuff and liberation theologies and also Catholic literatures. And Mary Gordon, like if you read Pearl, you realize this is like a re -imagined Simone Weil. Like she's fictionalized some of the key questions of what we do with sacrifice and what we do with young women's sacrifice, political sacrifice.
a contemporary age. So I just couldn't not write about those, but I could have also written about so many others. So like Fanny Howe and Flannery O 'Connor. I have an article about Denise Levertov and I thought I would include Denise Levertov. I thought the book would include a lot more than it ended up including, but you know it was it was I was writing it in 2021. It wasn't really a year that I could do everything I wanted to.
My children were being homeschooled in my house with me. I couldn't go to the archives that I had hoped to go to. I had wanted to visit a lot of people's papers. So, you know, at some point you just have to say this will be the parameter and we'll just keep working on this more in the future. But I really wanted to look at the people who had had the most sustained and maybe surprising engagements with faith that I could find.
Cindy Wallace (39:32.492)
over the course of their careers. And those were the writers that I landed on, along with these poets who wrote these kind of verse biography sequences.
PJ (39:40.98)
Hmm. And if you don't feel comfortable answering this, that's fine. I've read a lot of Flannery O 'Connor, so I'm interested what parallels you see between Flannery O 'Connor, and this is good because then people can still, like, if they want the full version, they have to read your book, right? So this is the bonus, you know, deleted scenes. Is that something you feel comfortable speaking to, like what you see in Flannery O 'Connor?
Cindy Wallace (39:59.628)
Yeah, yeah.
Cindy Wallace (40:08.472)
Yeah, so it so Flandre O 'Connor actually has some letters where she talks about reading Simone Vey. So it's less like, I can definitely see that she's engaging with Simone Vey in this story and more like we know from her letters that she was reading Vey and thinking about Vey. And there's actually been some great scholarship in recent years about that kind of correlation and that conversation between the two. There's a book about.
PJ (40:14.866)
Mm.
Cindy Wallace (40:36.716)
about Ve and O 'Connor that's come out recently that I would lead people to. But again, because O 'Connor, like the project of her fiction wasn't to really struggle with Ve, that is why I didn't include her in the book, but she is another one of those where you read it and then when you start to think about it and you think about like attention and affliction and human suffering and violence, you begin to realize, this is really there as well.
PJ (41:04.552)
As soon as you said, Flannery O 'Connor, I was like, that makes total sense because like even Annie Dillard has like a lot about violence in her work. And I was like, Flannery O 'Connor has a lot about violence in her work. Yes.
Cindy Wallace (41:12.728)
Yep.
Cindy Wallace (41:17.336)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that, it's that kind of, and I think a lot of us, and this is part of like the moment, the kind of moment of late modernity that we were in and that we've been in for a while. Some scholars argue that starting with the enlightenment, we just started to believe that humans could escape suffering. And then we find these writers who kind of kept, keep pulling us back and saying like, I don't care how optimistic your anthropology is. Have you like looked around? Like,
Have you seen what's happening? And so I feel like Annie Dillard, she's really concerned with the reality of violence at the same time that she's so attentive to just the extraordinary beauty of planetary existence, right? And in O 'Connor, you read O 'Connor and when you get like a spark of goodness, you're like, it's so good. Like I needed that. You know?
PJ (42:09.876)
Yeah. Yes, yes. And actually, I mean, this is just right at the beginning of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. You have this idea of the sacred intermingled with the violent. And do you mind talking about Annie Dillard? You know, I'm thinking specifically, I mean, it's just the very beginning, the cat walking in with bloody footprints all over her and like trying to gift her stuff. And she's like,
She's talking about the use of blood, right, and its sacred nature and its violent nature. What is Annie Dillard dialoguing with Simone Vey in that moment?
Cindy Wallace (42:53.942)
Hmm, that's a great question. Yeah, I think that she's just really interested with Ve in the reality of what Ve often calls gravity or necessity, just this fact that we can't escape, that the universe has pain in it and it has violence in it, and that's how it works. You know, like you can't, like we have to eat, but for us to eat, something has to die.
You know, like there is not a way, as hard as we try, for us to escape the fact that what life relies on in this universe, they would say here below, is death at points. And that what ends up being most beautiful is sometimes bound up with sacrifice. And that's one of the really uncomfortable.
pieces of the aesthetics, but also the ethics that we would love, I think as humans, to shy away from, but that sometimes there are situations where the only way through is succumbing to pain. And whether that's because there are situations where like we ourselves can't escape pain, like we don't have control over it in our own lives, or whether the reality is that we have to sacrifice something for someone else's flourishing.
And I think Dillard and Vabe both bring us to that, that kind of contemplation of the nature of the universe, even just in its kind of natural systems. But then for both of them, that opens up to a contemplation of metaphysics or of the divine, which for both of them are like, you just, they're always looking for the point of connection between the two.
PJ (44:40.372)
And you mentioned this earlier that Simone Weil likes to go with the two different poles and push them both at the same time. As you're talking about suffering, do you think that her method of contradiction, like creative tension, not contradiction, that's what you said, is connected with this idea of suffering that because we're pushing both at the same time that that's kind of, she sees some way of those being interlinked in life?
Cindy Wallace (45:10.04)
Yeah, I think so. I do. I do. I mean, I think, yeah, I have a couple of thoughts on that. I think it is important to remember that Simoneve lived with chronic pain. She had serious headaches that affected her throughout her life. And she had periods of just really significant fatigue that affected her throughout her life. And that shape.
PJ (45:21.108)
Hmm.
Cindy Wallace (45:38.808)
what she does. But I also think that it's important to remember that philosophically she was really influenced by this idea of metaxu or metaxu which is this idea that separations are also links and that what is kind of like dramatically different is also I lost him.
Cindy Wallace (48:23.48)
You
PJ (49:03.845)
I am so sorry, that was really exciting.
Cindy Wallace (49:05.046)
No worries, no worries. You froze and I was like, and then you were gone.
PJ (49:08.901)
man. I, yeah. Ben there. Yes. Just, just gone.
Well, always a good transition point. You were just talking about Simone Weil's chronic pain. Such a great way to segue back in. So the question was, as Simone Weil has been talking about this kind of creative tension where she takes two polls of a question, she works through that. Is that tied to her view of suffering?
Cindy Wallace (49:27.612)
I'm
PJ (49:47.173)
And you said you had a couple thoughts on that.
Cindy Wallace (49:47.256)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, the first is that we have to remember that she did live with these headaches and she, so she was always really struggling in her life because she had so much she wanted to do and she had so much she wanted to engage with. But also I think we can go to the concepts that affected her thought. And one of those is this kind of platonic idea of mataku.
which is this idea of kind of intermediaries where two things that are maybe opposites or maybe don't seem linked at all are at points linked by exactly what separates them. And the example that she gives is of a prison cell where the wall is what divides two prisoners, but if they knock on it, they can communicate.
And she talks about things in human experience as being sort of mediators, like that prison wall or like a bridge between the human and the divine. But I think she means that, or she uses it in other ways to talk about the kind of connection point of what separates two oppositions. And there's always going to be a struggle.
right, in trying to hold that creative tension and trying to see both sides. It's so much more comfortable just to pick a side of something and just like sit on it, right? Like it's so much more comfortable. I mean, and we see this in like polarized contemporary life. It's really comfortable to choose a side and then not have to think about it anymore. And so there is a, there is an element of kind of giving up oneself.
in order to really contemplate the ways in which two opposing things can be true at the same time. That doesn't necessarily have to lead to radical suffering, but for some people it does for various reasons, you know? But even for those it doesn't, like it can just be cognitively and emotionally taxing. It asks something of us to inhabit that complexity.
PJ (51:56.453)
And help me here. I think there's like a parallel track here even as you're talking about it can lead to radical suffering You we've mentioned Levin us a couple times This idea of radically encountering the other always demand something from us and change almost always results in suffering and that's why people don't like to encounter truly encounter other people because it demands change and that seems to be a little bit of what
Cindy Wallace (52:20.886)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (52:25.443)
You're saying they is pointing towards. Is that fair?
Cindy Wallace (52:30.136)
I think that's completely fair. Yeah, Levinas didn't love every aspect of Vase thought, but they do really agree on this point that attention to another is always going to ask something of us, as you say. And I mean, and we see this again and again and again, right? Like, I have a child. And I think parenting is a really potent example of this, right? The love that it takes to help
PJ (52:56.737)
Yes.
Cindy Wallace (53:00.158)
another human life flourish, it is demanding. It is not, and there are ways in which, and this is the critique of Levinas and the critique of Ve that a lot of feminists bring, is the fact that in our culture, historically, in Western cultures, there are certain groups of people who have been disproportionately expected to sacrifice themselves.
and that's gendered and that's raced and there are, you know, there was deeply critical of any mode of slavery and also of colonialism for this reason. Because it's like a culture takes an entire people group and sacrifices them for the wellbeing of somebody else against their will. But when we choose to sacrifice ourselves for others, there can still be something really beautiful in that. And that's the kind of...
like the kind of retrieval of this ethic of attention that involves self -sacrifice is when we can see instances where that isn't kind of mandated across an entire group of people, but it's something that we enter into, or even if it's a suffering that we choose to kind of make meaning out of that we didn't really choose, something beautiful can still come of that. And so there is a kind of redemptive angle there.
that makes some people really uncomfortable, but it does seem to be the way a lot of the world functions. And so I write about that at the end of the book when I write about the kind of integrity that living a kind of countercultural life asks of us in our contemporary moment. What does it look like to live with ethical integrity? It might look like a bit of self -emptying, you know? And I think that's one of the things that people find really compelling in VE's legacy.
in her philosophical writing, but also in these literary texts that bear witness to her.
PJ (54:57.573)
I want to be respectful of your time and so just for a final question here, as our audience leaves from listening to this episode, what's one thing you'd ask them to take away to just meditate on throughout the week?
Cindy Wallace (55:17.912)
That's a beautiful question. I love that question. I would probably answer that question differently in any moment. You know, like I could answer it a lot of ways. I could answer it many ways. Yeah, yeah, no, I'll just choose one. I'll just choose one. I think that, I think that Vay invites us to think about what it looks like.
PJ (55:28.453)
Right, right, right, right.
There's a lot of good things to meditate on. You don't have to find the perfect one. What's a good one? Yes.
Cindy Wallace (55:44.856)
to pay attention to the world in ways that aren't maybe popular or easy or just the sort of obvious handed to us way of approaching anything. And so I would invite viewers and listeners to think about that. What might it look like to step back from our habits of attention into a more intentional practice?
of attention? Where are we putting our attention? Who are we paying attention to? What sources of information are we paying attention to? And what practices of attention are most likely to open us up to surprise and to truth? Where are we most likely to find truth? Maybe almost like a little self audit.
PJ (56:15.298)
Hmm.
Cindy Wallace (56:41.016)
Do our practices, you know, do our practices of attention lead us in the direction of truth and what might it look like to make one change that would take us further in that direction?
PJ (56:52.613)
It gives a whole new definition of internal for internal revenue service. sorry, I couldn't resist it. That's, I, I, I'm afraid that I've ruined the moment. That was a tremendous, a tremendous thing to ask. a little ring of, the platonic from they, or the, the know thyself there. Dr. Wallace, thank you so much. what a great way to end today's podcast. And I really appreciate you coming on today.
Cindy Wallace (56:56.984)
Yeah, the audit.
Cindy Wallace (57:18.616)
thanks so much for inviting me.