Valentine Shell

The Cost of Attention: 

A Performative Close-Reading Lecture on Simone Weil’s “The Sea” 

This is a lecture on attention. So PAY ATTENTION. 

But what does it mean to pay attention? How much does attention cost? From my experience, it costs something like several trips to a therapist and a monthly toll billed to your mental health. Sounds reasonable? [cue uproarious canned laughter] 

But really, what do we pay for our attention? We need to cosplay philosophy students and define our terms. Don’t forget your jacket with the elbow patches and sense of moral superiority. Our major term here is attention, which I’m not going to provide a cliché Merriam-Webster definition for; I prefer etymology, or philology if you read too much C. S. Lewis. From the Latin attendere, from ad- tendere, meaning literally ‘to stretch to’ (“Attend”). Like Arctic flowers toward the sun, like second graders away from teachers. We pull ourselves out of ourselves, like spirits pulled out of taffy at a theme park. Let’s take a moment to stretch, shall we? Stretch your eyes. Stretch your fingernails. Stretch your beating heart. 

Now what is it to which we stretch? What is the object of attention? The thing in the present, that ephemeral, majestic, immutable thing-in-existence. Let’s ask the sea; I’m sure she won’t mind. Now stretch again. Stretch your eyes, fingernails, beating heart to the sea. Can you see it now, gray reflecting gray; feel it now, cleaning dirt from your cuticles; beat it now, flowing through untapped arteries. Careful now, don’t pay too much attention, or we’ll flood the fourth floor. 

Well, so what now? What does attention do? 

Let’s get our feet wet. A good friend of mine, Simone Weil, not de Beauvoir, we’ll discuss gender another time; Weil made her whole life about paying attention. She paid attention

to people, places, things, societal classes, abstract concepts, all the different nouns we learned in kindergarten. The key was Weil’s way of paying attention. To pay attention, for her, was “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object” (Weil, 2). So get your fishnets ready, because we’re going to whore ourselves out to some objects. 

As we lay down on the table for our etherization, let us go then, you and I, as we float past the window-panes with our disembodied thought. Let’s land on the sea-shore, and see how she, the sea, pays attention. (Try saying that five times fast.) “Sea, docile at ebb. Sea, slave to the silence” (Weil, line 1). In this translation, she is ‘slave;’ fettered, broken in like an old boot; in the French, “soumise,” submissive, bowing to the silence, the air between that cracks the sky and sea (Weil, line 1). Which is right? Which is real? Depends on if you’re a philosopher or a poet; if you’re both, only God or Satan can help you now. 

“Sparse sea, chained for eternity to the flows” (Weil, line 2). Another point for slave; another point for the philosophers. The sea does not control herself; she is passive, accepting her fate, rolled about across ocean floor like so many hot dogs in a gas station. “Mass open to sky, mirror of obedience” (Weil, line 3). In the French, “offerte au ciel,” an offertory to the sky—actually doubling the meaning of the English translation’s ‘mass’—funny how that works out—the sea offers herself to the sky as ‘mirror of obedience,’ the titular line of the book I found this poem in. Here, here is where we finally get into the whole non-sense of attention. When I look down at the sea, I do not see beneath her waves; I see the sky, reflected below their haughty self. The sea, majestic in her being, is in utter obedience to the world around her; the wind, the sky, the shore all bind and direct her as they see fit.

She is a mirror filled with obedience; but yet again, meanings double like a times table: she is a mirror of obedience. She, in her being, in her reflections, reflects the obedience that exists within us. There is a reason that I, and Weil, personify her, gender her—sorry, sorry, de Beauvoir snuck in for a moment there—we see something of ourselves in the world-out-there. By seeing her, seeing what she does, she reflects what we do, what we ought to do. By paying attention to the sea, her nature is revealed to us, and in that revelation, we begin, reluctantly, to  learn what it is to pay attention. 

Looking up from the mirror—or down into it—whichever floats your boat—we see “The distant stars” (Weil, line 4). Or are they so distant? Physically, yes, but as we see them, are they not beamed into our eyes like Captain Kirk? We catch their centuries-old light, and hold it and see it, and they are there for us. Even though some of them are dead and gone, black holes, supernovas, white dwarves, in that beholding, they are there, in their places in the sky. They may not exist, yet they are still present to us; is not presence closeness? When you behold a thing, give it attention, are you not drawn to it, like one of those dead stars, those black holes? 

Those “distant stars, effortlessly, have the power / to weave into you every night these new folds” (Weil, lines 4-5). The intended ‘you’ here is the sea, but cannot stars weave folds into us as well? Have we not called on them for our fates for eons? Next time you see a star, find the thread it has you on. Pull on it, gently, like a surgeon or a grandmother, and see if you can tug your fate close enough to the ground that you can read it in the newspaper. Never change it; that’s how Oedipus fucked his mom. Gently let it guide you. Let the bits and bobs of universe whisper in your ears things you can’t bear to hear, and call up the strength of the placid sea to endure them.

The stars have faded away, and in the matter of minutes, as we dance on the seashore, the world has shifted, and “morning arrives to fill up all the space” (Weil, line 6). As the orange glow swallows the horizon, the philosophers and poets begin arguing. In English, the philosophers say, “it,” the morning, “takes and gives back the gift of clarity;” en français, the poets say “Elle accueille et rend le don de la clarté” (Weil, line 7. Emphasis is mine.). Praise be to the gendering of French nouns, for it tells us that it is not le matin, the morning that we could be referring to with the French elle. Fine, de Beauvoir, you get one. Now get out of here. It is she, the sea, that must be meant here, at least by the poets. The philosophers call the sea passive; the poets call her a gracious host, with ‘accueille’ translating most directly to welcoming, as the sea gently opens her door to Morning, accepts the clarity along with the cheap bottle of grateful Chardonnay, allows him to stay awhile as they chat, and sends the clarity back with him as he leaves. Who is right, philosopher or poet? Do you wear tweed or smoke weed? 

As “A faint gleam comes down to rest on the surface,” the sea “spreads out in attention, without desire;” she has become the patient, etherized on the table, spread-eagled across the ocean floor (Weil, lines 8-9). Most importantly, she is totally content, in total attention, without desire at all. Oh, to lie there like her, in the soft grass next to the mausoleum. To look up at the dawnlight and simply behold it. Ascribing no meaning to it, no grand notions ladled up from the cauldron of my mind. It is always bubbling, churning, refusing to stop stewing like the vocab word I taught the fifth graders. I ask you what I asked them; can you raise your hand and tell me about a time when you or someone you know was stewing? [accept a few answers, thank them for sharing, validate them, etc.] 

See, the problem with ADHD, with attention, for me is that I am never not stewing—pardon the double negative; I am always stewing. Some thought, some anxiety, is

always just under the surface, a pressure always moments from bursting, questions that worsen as they go unheard. I turn to the sea because she has mastered that art of releasing herself to enslavement, freeing herself into chains. She can gaze at the sky all day until she becomes them. I can only achieve this kind of attention in reverie, in a mutual ouroboric devouring where I consume the object, and it consumes me. See, I told you we’d whore ourselves out. Consuming each other, we conjoin, consummating our existences to each other, and I enter reverie, my being, my perception, my self-in-existence leaving my fragile body to engage with not the thing-in-existence, but the thing-as-truth. Then, and only then, am I no longer desiring. I am momentarily freed from the weight of expectation, until human voices wake me, and I drown in the sea, sinking “under a day that grows; and gleams, and then fades” (Weil, line 10). 

Well that certainly took a turn. Thankfully, I know how to swim; I’m an Eagle Scout, you know. The only things I still use from scouting are that and how to identify birds. Look, there’s one now! “Reflections of evening will illuminate / the wing suspended between sky and water” (Weil, lines 11-12). With all this light, I can’t tell which one. It’s probably something symbolic, a dove or an albatross or a blue-footed booby. Floating on the surface, I feel the waves oscillating, “Fixed to the plane”—a fun paradox, that—fixed, yet still in constant motion (Weil, line 13). They are pulled back down and up, obeying “as sovereign laws dictate” (Weil, line 15). Just like our government, these sovereign laws often disagree. One says go up, another go down, constantly fighting each other. Weil had names for two of these; gravity and grace. Handy little alliteration there. Gravity is the force that pulls you to a thing; it drags you around like the stars with their threads, pulling you where it wants you to go. Gravity can be the sun, monthly bills, an ex-girlfriend. Weil’s grace is the force that opposes gravity, the thing that lets you rewrite the stars, that pulls you out of whatever black hole you’re hurtling toward. Grace can be a religion, a

good book, a smile from an old lady. Much like gender, they are not a binary; they exist and act simultaneously, just as the waves are both fixed in place and ever in motion. The sea carries out her duty impartially. She gently lifts and drops her “Transparent scales with secret arms of water, / weighing themselves, and the foam, and the iron” (Weil, lines 16-17). She carries out her duties “Just (without witness) to barques that are erring,” cosplaying blind Justice, but lifting her scales not in judgment, but in gentle aid (Weil, line 18). The philosophers really got to these lines, placing a thick period at the end of line 17 and blaring parentheses in line 18. According to the poets, the lines run “La balance aux bras secrets d’eau transparente / Se pèse elle-même, et l’écume, et le fer, / Juste sans témoin pour chaque barque errante,” one singular flowing sentence (Weil, lines 16-18). The philosophers, much like Weil, want you to pay attention, so when they translated, they left big glaring signs in the language saying, Hey! Hey you! Look here! This is what it’s about! Don’t get me wrong, the poets care about the meaning behind poems, but generally, they prefer to allow the reader to find it, like a neat rock on the seaside. Would you rather be pointed to meaning, or discover it? Would you rather solve the trolley problem, or create another? 

As the ships continue to pass by me on the sea’s surface, “with no error on the visible border,” I see that none of them are stopping for me (line 20). So I begin to cry out, “Vast sea, show favor to mortals; afflicted, / crushed at your edge, and lost within your desert” (Weil, lines 21-22). I feel my throat tighten and catch on the word ‘afflicted,’ as the philosopher in me draws it to the surface. Weil whispers in my ear what it is to be afflicted; affliction is “suffering that robbed its bearer of all dignity, both in the eyes of others and in their own eyes” (Lynch). And I am once again unable to capture an object in my attention. I am no longer a person floating on the sea, but a moth pierced on a corkboard, still wriggling my feeble legs, weakly protesting with

my papery wings, dreading the labels that others will force on me, Latin names that I never chose. I cry to the sea, “Speak to those who sink, before they are drowned,” pulled down by their own immense gravities (Weil, line 23). I begin to sputter and swallow the salty water, pleading, “Enter into our soul, o sea, our sister” (Weil, line 24). I ask her with my last choking breaths, “Deign to wash it clean, with waters that are just” (Weil, line 25). 

Before I am lost, I find myself back on the shore, waking from reverie. I cough the seawater out of my lungs. How did it get there? Why am I all wet? Why am I speaking French? Why do I know so goddamn much about attention, of all things? I look back out at the sea. She waves with the wind, reflecting the graying sky. 

So, did you pay attention? How many times did de Beauvoir appear? What role do the stars play in our destiny? What is the French word for ‘offertory?’ 

Why do we pay attention? 

How much does it cost?

Works Cited 

“Attend.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/attend. 

Lynch, Tony. “Simone Weil (1909-1943).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/weil/. 

Weil, Simone. “The Sea” from Mirror of Obedience: The Poems and Selected Prose of Simone Weil. Edited by Silvia Capriolglio Panizza and Philip Wilson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.