Brief: Antifascist (Autistic) Christianity: Simon(e) Weil (Part 1)
Matthew begins a two-part exploration of Simone Weil—French philosopher, mystic, and antifascist activist—through the lens of autism, embodiment, and political courage. Following the earlier Antifascist Christianity Woodshed series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this installment positions Weil as a kind of spiritual auntie to Greta Thunberg, whose uncompromising honesty, rooted in autistic perception, continues to disrupt fascist, capitalist, and liberal narrative.
Matthew traces Weil’s journey from childhood acts of solidarity, like giving up sugar during WW1, to her immersion in factory labor, revolutionary syndicalism, and frontline service in the Spanish Civil War. Weil’s refusal of privilege and their lifelong impulse to take on suffering emerge as core features of both her philosophy and her autistic experience. They also stood up to Leon Trotsky, calling out Soviet authoritarianism long before its collapse.
Weil can be understood not only through the posthumous notebooks and essays that editors and institutions reshaped into seventeen volumes, but through the lived reality of their embodied resistance. Their ideas remain striking: the notion of attention as the rarest form of generosity; the insistence that obligations come before rights; the practice of “decreation” as a release of ego in the service of love; and the “need for roots” as an antifascist alternative to blood-and-soil nationalism.
Part 2 of this series drops Monday on Patreon, where Matthew goes deeper into Weil’s autistic traits, their spiritual life, and how their philosophy continues to confront liberalism and fascism alike.
Support us on Patreon to access Part 2 and the full Antifascist Woodshed series.
Show NotesColes, Robert. Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2001.
Fitzgerald, Michael. The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006.
Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.
Lawson, Kathryn. Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil. New York: Routledge, 2024. doi:10.4324/9781003449621.
McCullough, Lissa. The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014.
Plant, Stephen. Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Revised and expanded edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008.
Song, Youming, Tingting Nie, Wendian Shi, Xudong Zhao, and Yongyong Yang. "Empathy Impairment in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Conditions From a Multidimensional Perspective: A Meta-Analysis." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (October 9, 2019): 01902. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01902.
Wallace, Cynthia R. The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. With a preface by T. S. Eliot. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Weil, Simone. Modern Classics Simone Weil: An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and five, six white people pushing me in the cloud.
I'm going, what the hell?
Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts at heroin.
All you gotta do is be see the packet, they'll have to open it, just accept it.
She was very upset, crying.
Once I slow the gun, I try to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
Listen to the Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcast.
Overwhelmed by investing.
If you're anything like us, the hardest part is getting started.
That's why we created the Investing for Beginners Podcast.
Our goal is to help simplify money so it can work for you.
We invite guests to demystify investing.
At least try to be setting aside like the minimum 10% into the 401k.
I'll teach you the basics of the market.
Yeah, I think compound interest should be at the start of any discussion about investing.
And we've had investment professionals who teach in a simple way, a valuation-driven bear market.
You know, we haven't really seen yet.
And I think everyone's thinking about it, but we haven't really seen yet.
Our QA episodes feature questions from listeners just like you.
So, what do you think about the situation with DTPI, which is Activision?
I'm Davey Eherin, and I'm Andrew Saythur.
And we hope you join us on the Investing for Beginners Podcast.
on the Investing for Beginners podcast.
Hello, everybody.
This brief is called Anti-Fascist Autistic Christianity, Simone Weil, part one, with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for our subscribers.
There will be more in this series as well.
I'm Matthew Remski.
This is Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky.
Uh, the podcast is on Instagram and threads.
And please support our Patreon.
We really appreciate it.
So this is the second of several two-part series that I'll be doing on anti-fascist Christianity.
And the first one rolled out over this past Labor Day weekend, and it told the story of German theologian and would-be assassin of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who learned his anti-fascism, I argued, in the Black Church of the Harlem Renaissance, and on his road trips to the Deep South in 1930.
Now that all fits into this series I've been doing on Patreon called Anti-Fascist Woodshed, where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this very shitty time.
Okay, so I'm writing and recording this before the global Sumo flotilla is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Gaza on September 14th or 15th.
This is the international uh flotilla of boats that is attempting to break uh Israel's blockade of Gaza by bringing aid, things like you know, baby formula and medical supplies and flour.
Now, I'm not sure what the situation will be when this is published, but I do know that the security minister and Israeli national fascist mascot Itamar Ben Gvir has proposed jailing Greta Thunbere and other flotilla members under terrorism laws for attempting to bring all of these just supplies and aid across the Mediterranean.
Now, the last time I published on Tunbere was on the occasion of her first arrest by Israeli naval commandos back in June, in an episode that was about the relationship between her anti-fascism and her autistic experience of life.
And at the heart of that is Tunbere's uncompromisingly honest nature and her inability to ignore contradictions in the world and to paper them over with social niceties.
So I chronicled the hatred thrown at Thunbere, and how many right-wing ghouls call her, you know, the mentally ill puppet of green Marxists or a Hamas supporting anti-Semite.
But I also described how liberal media and institutions, just as they fail to defend everyone from fascists, have specifically thrown Tunbere under the bus as she relentlessly exposes the hypocrisies of powerful adults.
And as her message has evolved from climate alarm to a direct critique of capitalism, colonialism, and systemic exploitation.
They really don't like it when Thunbere asserts that climate justice cannot exist without social justice, or when she links environmental destruction to war and oppression.
She has a structural analysis, and she focuses on the profit motive and the failure of markets, and she challenges the foundational beliefs of liberal Western society.
Most broadly, liberals don't like it when she insists that normal was already a crisis.
But normal being a crisis is not something she would be able to turn away from.
This is a basic observation in autistic culture.
Thunbere initially called autism her superpower before learning a little bit more about disability rights and better language use.
She's always learning, and this is something that I really admire about her.
And she has also acknowledged that autism can be a really difficult condition to experience if your society cannot meet your support needs.
And in fact, that particular struggle is central to her origin story as an activist, because from about the age of 13, the stress of masking or suppressing natural behaviors so that she can conform, led to autistic burnout or a kind of collapse that caused her to withdraw from school.
And also, however, allowed her time to disconnect from the hamster wheel of capitalist expectations, so she could reflect on the questions that we are generally not allowed to reflect on.
And it's for this reason that I cited the work of autistic philosopher Robert Chapman, who suggests in their wonderful book called Empire of Normality, that autism becomes a pathology as industrial and cognitive capitalism create rigid and accelerated demands for sociality and flexibility, and that this disproportionately disables those who cannot comply.
So today I'll get into the story of someone we might see as the spiritual auntie of Greta Thunbere.
This is the French anti-fascist philosopher Simone Vey, born in 1909 in Paris, and that means her autism has nothing to do with vaccines, Bobby.
And she died in 1943 in Ashford, Kent of tuberculosis and disordered eating.
And that happens to be the challenge that Greta Thunbere was able to overcome in our own time with improved care, understanding, and support.
Now, just a language note before I start, I'm making the choice that I haven't seen any other commentator on they make, which is to use the pronouns they, them throughout to refer to they because they were clearly non-binary, which is not uncommon among autistic people.
They rejected gender expectations in every manner.
Their parents, who were extremely supportive in many ways, especially for the time period, called Simon our son number two.
And their brother Andre referred to them as La Trolesse, which I understand translates as androgynous imp.
And they would often sign letters to their parents with the words your son, and they often referred to themselves as Simon, leaving off the final feminizing E. Okay, in this first part, remember the second part drops on Monday.
I'm going to look at Vay in three segments.
First of all, their anti-fascist street cred.
Secondly, the philosophical and theological ideas they're most famous for.
And by the third section, I'll be turning to the fact that as an autistic person in the world, I believe their experiences have been largely absorbed into a defanged discourse of manners and abstractions.
And that began with the way in which their countless disorganized notebooks were collected, data mined and edited, and then shuffled into an order and subject headings and titles and published in books in a way that never would have occurred to Simone, that she never would have chosen or perhaps even cared about.
The Simone Ve that comes to us in books is, I believe, the neatened up construction of a neurotypical world.
They've been curated to quibble with instead of engage.
I believe they were editorially absorbed into the kinds of liberal institutions and discourses that their anti-fascism rebelled against.
So for a series about anti-fascism, Vay's street cred is solid.
Throughout their life, they threw themselves headlong, usually without preparation or a lot of support, into one activist boot camp after another, driven by a persistent need to investigate and feel the injustices of the world that they saw so clearly, and that no amount of veneer could cover over.
That drive was there right from childhood.
In 1914, they're five years old, they refused to wear cotton socks, finding the fabric too luxurious and warm compared to the less fortunate whose feet were bare.
And then after listening to the news reports from the Western Front, Simone gave up sugar in solidarity with the soldiers.
Now, this would become a lifelong theme that they found it impossible to abide suffering in others, especially related to food or bodily comfort.
And they had to somehow partake in that.
They had to take it on themselves.
In their early teens, they started attending labor meetings.
During a family holiday in Chals Les eaux, they talked with hotel staff about their working conditions.
And they was scandalized by what they learned and urged the workers to form a trade union.
In their 20s, while studying philosophy and education, they gathered signatures for a petition against compulsory military instruction for male students.
And they also hung out with revolutionary syndicalists.
When they were a school teacher in Le Puy, they became allies with the unemployed and even led a demonstration before the city council, which led a conservative newspaper to turn on their slur generator and pump out the accusation that Ve was a quote, red virgin of the tribe of Levi, bearer of Muscovite gospels.
And true to the tag, Vay sought out hard farm labor in Normandy and also spent a year on the assembly line at a Renault auto plant in Paris.
But these experiences were physically grueling because Vey wasn't cut out for manual labor, really.
Their short life, which ended at the age of 34, is the story of physical challenges, but more so the story of a world that couldn't accommodate their support needs.
Now, in the follow-up episode on Monday, I'll go deeper into the reports and self-reports of their physical experience, the awkwardness, clumsiness, fatigue through low calorie intake, the boundaries around physical touch, because all of these details point in a very obvious direction that most commentators on their life and work are shy to approach, seemingly out of the polite belief that being honest about autism would somehow pathologize or devalue their work.
But but that's upside down.
It's actually an ableist instinct to not investigate, to not accept and celebrate the real differences that contributed to their penetrating insights.
I have a friend named Jude Mills, who's now a theology grad student, and we were talking about this on WhatsApp, and she said, as an autistic academic, the weird avoidance of this topic by others is palpable.
They get really squirmy when I talk about it when she discloses her own autism diagnosis.
Even the ones who are clearly undiagnosed neurodivergent themselves, because academia is full of them, as you might imagine.
This is the legacy of ableism.
I've lost count of the people who've tried to convince me that giving myself a label is misguided, or people who will say massively ableist things like you're clearly high functioning, or I wouldn't have known.
And her retort to that is yes, because I'm masking like fuck for your benefit.
Autism is not a disease.
It's a difference that becomes a disability defined by capitalist demands to conform in social and economic terms.
And for people like Thunbere and Vey, and countless other people, now given a voice by Instagram and TikTok these days, it's also a perceptual skill set.
Okay, back to Vey.
All of that labor obsession in childhood and as a teen was only prelude to traveling to Berlin in 1932 at the age of 21.
They wanted to hang out with Marxists and figure out what was going on, and they saw enough to eventually predict the success of the Nazis.
And they also used that time to make the revolutionary connections that would eventually compel them to abandon their pacifism and fight with the anarchists in Spain and the civil war against Franco and his fascists.
In that war, Vey survived reconnaissance expeditions under fire, but their comrades didn't want her handling a rifle, given their clumsiness and her very thick glasses.
They'd seen Vey try to dance, and it wasn't pretty.
So Vey's service was actually ended by a severe foot injury, not from Shrapnel, not a landmine.
They actually stepped in a pot of boiling oil in a field kitchen.
Now, a crucial thing to know about Vey's political formation is that they didn't abide bullshit from anyone.
In 1932, Vey published an article entitled Towards the Proletarian Revolution, which was a scathing attack on orthodox Russian communism.
They mocked it as a dictatorship of a bureaucratic class.
And the article found its way to Leon Trotsky himself, who was then living incognito in Paris, and he was butthurt.
Vey's parents actually knew him and hosted him for a while.
And when they did, he and Vey quarreled with Ve grilling him on the tyranny of the Soviet state over the Russian people.
And it's actually pretty hilarious to me that he argued with Simone at all, given that at the time he was in exile, thrown out of the Soviet Union by Stalin, who eventually, of course, ordered his assassination in Mexico City in 1940 to preempt any attempt he might make at a comeback.
Trotsky was living a contradiction, and Vey sniffed it out.
They were warning him.
They could see what was coming as sure as they could see fascism on the rise in Germany.
And exasperated, all Trotsky could do was to shout at Vey, asking if they belonged to the salvation army.
This is an insult about their alleged conservative individualism and sentimental pacifism, which, of course, he got all wrong.
Trotsky dubbed their views as revolutionary melancholia and said that their philosophy was concocted to defend their personality, which is, come on.
I mean, what philosophy doesn't defend the philosopher's personality.
But according to one biography at least, Trotsky felt impressed and perhaps even humbled by Vey's uncompromising morality.
Years later, during the Nazi occupation of France, Vey joined the resistance in the South and then in Marseille, acting as a courier and distributing anti-fascist journals, and also offering their rations to immigrant laborers from Indonesia and other colonial populations, interned By the Vichy collaborationists.
They also ambitiously proposed a Supreme Council of the Rebellion to coordinate internal French resistance.
And this contributed to the establishment of the National Council of the Resistance by the Free French.
They advocated for a plan to form a mobile unit of frontline nurses because they believed that such a unit just seen to provide care in the heart of battle would provide a powerful moral statement against the inhumanity of war.
And they also asked to be parachuted into occupied France as a secret agent.
And Charles de Gaulle himself thought that Simone Vey was insane for this suggestion, which in my world is a top badge Arnar.
So that's a journey through Vey's anti-fascist courage, which was nonstop and embodied.
She was always doing something.
So that lets me turn to a summary of the ideas they had that most commentators down through time have picked out as uniquely helpful from those piles of notebooks that stand in parallel to their life in the flesh.
And on Monday, I'll get to the question of how their anti-fascism might have intersected with their autistic traits.
So, where to start?
Apropos to our age, I'd start with Vey's idea of attention, which they considered to be at the very heart of their philosophy.
They called attention the rarest and purest form of generosity.
And it became fundamentally linked for Vey to both prayer and care for others.
For Vey, compassion involved paying attention to an afflicted man and identifying oneself with him in thought.
Now, relatedly, they actually argued against the ideological basis of the French Revolution.
For Vey, it wasn't revolutionary enough.
They claimed that it should never have been built on the notion of human rights, that it should have been built on the recognition of human obligations.
Because on an ultimate level, they argued that obligations come before rights.
And the reasoning here is that an obligation retains its full kind of nature, its full force of existence, even if it's unrecognized by anyone.
Whereas a right isn't worth very much if nobody recognizes it.
And that's because obligations are derived from what Vey described as the earthly needs of the body and the human soul, which they considered sacred.
Each human need entails a corresponding obligation from others.
So needs and obligations, Vey said, cannot be subordinated to reasons of state or money or nationality or race or any other consideration.
Obligations are characterized by the imperative to give something.
They are motivated by a desire to do what justice demands, and they arise from a real feeling for others.
So fulfilling an obligation is always and everywhere good, unlike rights, which can be used for good or bad purposes.
Now, Vey believed that ethical actions based on the impersonal desire for the good lead to a higher good, which is impersonal.
But by contrast, a right isn't really anything on its own, but it comes into being in relation to the obligation to which it responds.
So the effective exercise of a right originates not from the individual claiming it, but from others who feel an obligation towards that individual.
They also said that rights have this kind of commercial flavor to them, evoking legal claims and arguments, that they're always asserted in a tone of contention and that their assertion relies on force in the background or else it will be laughed at.
So Vey saw rights as transactional and tied to egos and power dynamics, but obligations, on the other hand, were foundational, unconditional, and a kind of impersonal call to care for others and manifest love in the world.
And I just find this to be an incredible distinction to contemplate as liberalism crumbles.
And while it crumbles, as it tries to hold on to the notion of individual rights as being salutary, and as we've come through decades of framing obligations as entitlements, I think it's even more relevant.
Okay, so next thing that I'll focus on is that Vey coined a term, and it's a little bit strange.
They coined the term decreation.
And that one rubs some Marxists and feminists the wrong way, as it seems to point to a kind of esotericism or a withdrawing from material presence and dignity and dialectics.
But I don't think that that's what Vey was getting at.
Also, because Vey basically died from not eating, decreation has often been mistaken as a call for self-annihilation.
But I think Vey understood it as a kind of release of the self that expands the personality and makes space for difference.
It's a kind of spiritual stripping down that enables a perception of some sort of larger, less distorted truth.
They described it as a creative act that participates in all creation.
They felt that decreation signified the death of the ego-driven self so that the other could be allowed to exist on their own terms.
And I'll come to this later because that's fundamental to Vey's concept of love.
There's a lot more, but I'll end with this idea that they put forward in a book called The Need for Roots, which is the idea of enracinement or rootedness.
This is the idea that human beings have fundamental, often unrecognized needs of being or the soul beyond material well-being.
They need rootedness in a community in history and culture.
Uprootedness, Vey argues, is a catastrophe.
Now, your eyebrows at this, especially if it seems to be coming from an anti-fascist.
Because how does Vey distinguish this idea of the need for roots from, you know, appeals to nationalism that romanticize the blood and soil?
Well, they've got that covered because they're actually responding exactly to that, presenting fascist forms of nationalism as a dangerous perversion or consequence of uprootedness that result from the excess of inequality.
Now, Vey doesn't directly name capitalism here, but they might as well have, because they say, quote, money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate by turning desire for gain into the sole motive, unquote.
So Vey describes the wage-earning class, particularly those under peace work as experiencing uprootedness most acutely due to the absolute and continuous dependence on money.
Vey says that this dependence morally uproots people, turning them into industrial brawn and leading to a sense of not being at home in their workplaces, dwellings, or even their own social and intellectual activities, or even themselves.
So she really sort of goes off on Marx's alienation there.
Uprooted people, Vey says, have two options.
Spiritual lethargy that resembles death, or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often through violent methods.
And those who are not yet uprooted or only partly so will bear the brunt of that violence.
She directly connected Hitler's Germany to this phenomenon where humiliation and economic crisis led to an aggressive form of uprootedness and irresponsibility.
And instead of the anxious and hollow patriotism that they reached for to fix that problem, they proposed compassion for one's country, a quote, poignantly tender feeling for some beautiful, precious, fragile, and perishable object.
Akin, they suggested, to the love one feels for children, aged parents, or a beloved wife.
This love, quote, keeps its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes, and scandals contained in the country's past, in its present, and it's and its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly, unquote.
This is totally different from a romanticized, uncritical adoration of a nation's history or supposed destiny.
The fascist has been deracinated from cultures of care.
Of course he has to invent a past and a country to imagine it in.
Music So I started in the opposite way to what most commentators on Vade do.
I led with what they did with their body, their lived experience, and how at every turn they were putting skin in the game.
And I think that's the best choice, even though the reason they are remembered is for their writing.
Now, as I've already suggested, their writing is unquestionably brilliant and penetrative, but I believe it's also secondary and parallel to the work of their body moving in space.
And so I'll spend time on this relationship between actions and writing, because I think we're at a point historically where the alienation of media from action is increasing day by day.
Last year I was enthralled by Naomi Klein's articulation of the mirror world idea in her incredible book, Doppelganger.
This is the distorted reality where the same issues are discussed but through radically different interpretations, coming to radically different conclusions depending upon the political orientation.
So Klein's mirror world is an alternate universe, populated by far-right conspiracy theories and a rhetoric that twists progressive causes and social issues into fear, hatred, and misinformation.
All of that checks out.
It's all 100% true.
But I've also been feeling that there's a primal or structural mirror world looming larger over my shoulder.
The world of books and live streams and social feeds and commentariat bears a strange and inscrutable relationship to the realities it is trying to observe and address.
All of the news in the world about genocide has not stopped genocide from happening.
And part of that, I think, is because news and discourse is alienated by commodification.
We all know it is its own product.
And those of us who produce it are often so locked into that production cycle we're not doing anything else.
I often feel like a parasite.
And not to mention the fact that we have a long intellectual history that explicitly divorces thought from action.
As W.B. Yates said, you can perfect your life or your art, but not both.
And that's the kind of wisdom that works really well for the artist who doesn't want to not be an asshole.
Simon Vey was not like that at all.
I'm also currently immersed in a book, ironically, uh called Don't Talk About Politics.
It's by the philosopher and social scientist Sarah Stein Lubrano.
Lubrano basically says that the political discourse we're swimming in often fails to change political attitudes or realities because it relies on these flawed ideas.
So one is the marketplace of ideas and the debate as war, these two models that just don't work, and she gives all of the evidence for that.
And she argues that human psychology, because it's marked by confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, makes us highly resistant to being swayed by words alone.
It's really actions, relationships, lived experiences, and robust democratic infrastructure That are the true drivers of political change.
Now, that's a huge alarm bell for anyone paid for their words, including me, no matter where their political commitments lie.
Vay fascinates me because they were never interested in the professional career of words and writing or being a pundit or a philosopher.
We do know that they were obsessed with living their life and improving material conditions for the suffering.
And this both burned them out and also never allowed them to consider their thoughts in capitalist terms.
And that's a profound model for those of us who are interested in anti-fascism.
Because yes, we all have to eat and get the money to buy the food, but there's something about the capitalism of discourse that can interrupt or betray our ability to engage with the world as it is.
Now, from what I've read of Vey's thoughts on egolessness, they probably would have been content to leave their thoughts for posterity as aphoristic graffiti on the walls of the many towns and cities they tramped through.
So here's a few phrases that you can imagine scribbled on the toilet wall in Paris or the crumbling walls of Aragon destroyed by fascist shelling.
Quote, attention alone, that attention which is so full that the I disappears is required of me.
Quote, perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying I. Quote, religion, insofar as it is a source of consolation, is a hindrance to true faith.
Quote, man can only gain control over nature by obeying it.
Just put all that shit on t-shirts.
That's all I have to say.
They wasn't a book writer.
They did not write within the confines of capitalist knowledge production.
It wasn't just shyness or disorganization that meant that they never sent a manuscript to a publisher.
They journaled to record their experience and refine their thoughts, and they wrote letters to learn from comrades and share their heart.
They published articles and essays, but didn't publish a single book while alive.
So how did it come to pass that there are now 17 distinct book titles out there in their name?
It happened posthumously as their journals and papers were collected by family and friends who turned them over to editors and a post-war philosophy industry eager for explanatory content in the wake of the catastrophe.
Now, Vey's complete works have been put out in 16 volumes by Gallimard.
And I haven't done a total page count on that collection.
But if that average is 500 pages per book at 250 words per page, that's two million published words.
And very few of them were published before their death at 34.
So let's just do some math here.
Let's say that these journals begin at 20, and so the two million words get written over 14 years.
That's 140,000 words per year, or about 400 words per day.
However, in reality, it's a ton more than that, because all of their editors low-key complained about what they saw as the disorganized and fragmentary state of their journals, and why not, their journals.
One editor described the journals as fragments, notes, and sketches behind the floating terminology and an irresistible leaning towards the extreme and the contradictory.
Thomas Merton, a later commentator on Vey and himself a hypergraphic whirlwind, described some of Vey's collected papers as disorganized material.
And then many sources describe the final publications as abridgments or extracts.
So the question is how many words were left on the cutting room floor?
Twice as many as the two million?
Does that make 800 per day, three times 1,200 per day?
But even figuring out a per day rate is dodgy because We also know how physically busy Vey was, how much travel they did, how many activities they were engaged in.
They do refer to going through feverish writing benders that balance out the physical demands of their experiential research.
So I guess what I see are the hallmarks of intermittent hypergraphia, where on some days she's marching with farm workers or ducking bullets in Spain, and on other days they're scribbling up to 10,000 words in some endless fugue state.
And I recognize this because I am someone for whom hypergraphia has also ebbed and flowed throughout my life, stemming from a period of seizures that I suffered in my 20s.
Hypergraphia is one symptom of, you know, temporal lobe epilepsy or Geshwin syndrome, which also bestows an obsessive fascination with religious themes and content, but not necessarily devotional or commitment-oriented content, but also an obsession with sexuality or an obsession with completely avoiding sexuality.
More on this in a bit.
Other folks who present with hypergraphia might have bipolar symptoms, during which the writing surges during manic spells, or schizophrenic experiences in which they feel they are involuntarily taking dictation.
Now, Vey doesn't self-report seizures or internal voices, but by the year 1930, they are suffering from a pretty common experience among temporal lobe epilepsy folks, regular crushing migraines.
And for me, this is a crucial context for understanding Vey's writing in relation to the work and travels of their body.
What I see is that for Vey, writing is a coping, stimming, and even survival strategy deployed to process the over stimulation of moral and political action.
I'm not seeing a person who is sitting around thinking big thoughts and hoping to craft them into coherent books.
They were openly suspicious, actually, of any systematization of their work, because for them, I think writing was a temporal and illusory mirror.
They did say that their solution to living amidst tumult was, quote, to fill up notebook after notebook with thoughts hastily set down in no order or sequence, unquote.
And they couldn't stop doing it.
And they only ever wrote by hand.
And that was a trial, even from childhood.
The sources record that their hands were disproportionately small for their body, frequently swollen and painful.
And so, combined with challenged motor control, writing took tremendous focus and time, and it was not comfortable.
This is not someone who is writing by choice.
And so they leave behind these notebooks.
And I mentioned this part of the story to my autistic academic friend Jude Mills, and her take was that the philosophy and theology industries basically colonized Vey's work for raw materials.
So I ask again, why are there so many books when they themselves did not conceive of their writing in bookish terms?
Here's more or less how it happened for their most famous posthumous book, Gravity and Grace.
This is the book that brought them or their estate or their editors because they were dead by that point, global fame.
In 1941, Vey worked throughout the grape harvest season for Gustave Tibon.
This was a vine farmer and self-taught philosopher in the medieval town of Saint-Marcel d'Ardèche in southern France.
The sources say that in the evenings they read Platoh with him and taught him Greek, which they'd been fluent in since childhood.
Vey was 32 and Tibon was 38.
Sources say that Tibon was married with children, but I haven't been able to locate a timeline for that.
And all biographers of Ve emphasize their androgyny and asexuality and alleged fear of touch.
And on Monday, as I said, I'll say more about all of those assumptions and how commentators on Vey pretty much all strike out on the gender and neurodiversity and sexuality angles.
Tibone describes their relationship as uncomfortable at first because he was a devout Catholic and Vey was a Jewish radical, but admits that a strong bond grew between them.
So it sounds like they were close, although Thibault had to get over some Physical feelings he had.
He remembered Vey as, quote, prematurely bent and old looking due to asceticism and illness, and that, quote, their magnificent eyes alone triumphed in this shipwreck of beauty, unquote.
And as I'll get to, there's a predictable cloud of sexism surrounding any consideration of Vey's work.
But for their part, Vey was able to confide in Tibon things that dear friends confide.
In one letter to him, they wrote, quote, human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling, unquote.
They were close enough that maybe they had the feeling, and I believe this was rare for them, that he understood and respected them.
So at the end of their stay on the farm, they entrusted 11 of their notebooks to him, expressing some willingness for him to transmute the thoughts and publish them in a form that would reflect his own likeness.
So there's even a hint that they believed he might digest their thoughts and use them to enrich his own, zeroing out the imprint of their personality.
It sounds like they were giving him a gift.
So what did he do with those journals?
I think he used them to substantiate his own views.
As Stephen Plant writes in his short biography of Vey, Tibon's editorial selections were explicitly, quote, intent upon presenting Vey to the world as a Catholic saint in the making and to construct them as a religious philosopher of the void.
Now, is that what Vey wanted?
I doubt it.
I also doubt that Vey would have appreciated the begrudgingly admiring but also condescending forward by none other than T. S. Elliot to the 1952 English publication of The Need for Roots, in which the depressive Catholic Titan praised their genius, but for one who had never met Vey, spotlighted their difficult, violent and complex personality, as he put it.
He wrote that Vey could be, quote, unfair and intemperate and prone to astonishing aberrations and exaggerations.
And he attributed these to an excess of temperament rather than a flaw in intellect.
He noted Vey's paradoxical nature as a patriot who criticized France, a Christian who refused baptism and criticized the church, and as someone intensely Jewish who castigated the colonial project of Israel.
What Elliot doesn't mention is that the whole damn book was edited from notebooks by Albert Camus.
But he does mention that Tibon was an expert on Vey's personality.
Meanwhile, Vey allegedly hated that any focus should be placed on their personality.
But I think this has a double edge through the lens of neurodiversity.
The knowledge that one is never accepted as such, but also this drive towards moral purity that inevitably questions the relevance of the ego.
And so here I find a paradox.
In Lissa McCullough's 2014 book, Religious Philosophy of Simon Vey, there's this claim, quote.
Vey felt that their perspective on the world was embodied most essentially in their writings, not in their actions, and certainly not in their personal biography.
In life, they would tolerate no attention to their person, for the personality, the natural self, that which says I has a strictly negative value as something to be decreated and rendered transparent.
In their view, the better to refract the love of God in the world without egoistic distortion, unquote.
Now, this claim isn't footnoted with direct quotes or passages from Veh's writing.
So I don't know if Vey makes concrete enough statements about this in the thousands of pages that we have, but something seems off because their biography is an extraordinary tale of constant personal sacrifice, inextricable, in my opinion, from their embodied autistic experience.
And in other parts of their writing, they're really specific about the necessity of conjoining theory and practice.
So part of me wonders whether they would have felt differently about foregrounding personality if their physical existence hadn't been constantly stigmatized in gendered and ableist terms.
Because this is the sentence that stands out from McCullough, quote, in life, they would tolerate no attention to their person.
But what autistic person, aware or semi-aware of their difference and the extent to which their society can accommodate them, can tolerate the stress of masking, the stress of the cultural demands and male gaze that wants them to conform.
What kind of attention did they not tolerate?
And if they're writing aloud for a deflection of that attention, what is that reader missing?
To be honest, having one of their most famous quotes ringing around in my head makes me wonder how much of their life and yearning had to do with the absence of acceptance.
Because how else would you get to, as they did this statement, which is Vey's definition of love?
Quote, belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.
That as such is doing a lot of work.
I think it means understanding that the other is absolutely unchangeably other, that they exist and should exist as other.
A belief that that otherness is real and okay as it is.
And this begs the question for me of how on earth would fascism rise in a people who felt that in their bones?
Okay, that's it for today.
I'll say more about that definition of love and how the Marxist philosopher Richard Gilman Opalski understands it in his excellent book, Communism of Love on Monday.
And I'll also run down, as promised, all of the slam dunk data on Vay's neurodiversity and how I see it as inseparable from their anti fascism.
And as per the title of this two part series, I'll look at how Ve's spiritual life either came out of their fascism or the other way around.
