A curated archive of
works by M. Fath

PARALLEL
PRAYERS

Last updated Nov. 2025

¹ Published in a 1905 Russian publication titled "V.M Doroshevich East and War" by journalist Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich.Indian students faced intense pressure in the early colonial period, when Western-style university education (introduced by the British) was seen as one of the few paths to civil service positions and social advancement.

² Waiting for God is a collection of Weil's letters and essays written during her final years, documenting her radical spiritual philosophy while refusing institutional religion. Weil argues that genuine prayer is not petition but pure attention: a complete openness to reality that requires us to "decreate" ourselves, to undo our ego's constant manufacturing of meaning and become transparent vessels for divine love. She insists we must consent to necessity, to the world's weight and affliction, without consolation or escape into fantasy; only through this absolute acceptance of reality (including suffering) can grace enter.The "waiting" in her title isn't passive but an active discipline of attention without grasping, learning to love without possessing, to believe without joining, to create without claiming authorship... What she calls becoming "impersonal" enough that God's love can pass through us toward the world, making us instruments rather than owners of truth.

ESSAY

Light, Otherwise

University of Madras student ties his hair to nail to prevent sleeping at night while preparing for exams, 1905. ¹

Simone Weil understood prayer as attention without object, a discipline of receptivity that unmakes the one who attends. In the Renault factory, with hands bloodied by metal sheets, she discovered that repetitive labor could become contemplation; not transcendence, but a descent into matter's opacity where light enters through fracture (that's right - God's in the factory, not the cathedral!).This is the path we trace: the artist's work as what Weil called "consent to necessity". Not the romantic myth of inspiration, but something more severe and tender: Paul Celan writing after Auschwitz, each poem a "message in a bottle" thrown toward an addressee who may not exist. Agnes Martin drawing the same line ten thousand times until personality dissolves into vibration. Ann Demeulemeester working through the same black thread drawn through fabric thousands of times, rendering the shadow not as absence but as light's most honest form ("white shadows", she calls them). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Dictee, fragmenting language itself to speak to displacement, each broken sentence in reverence to that which cannot be made whole. Patti Smith dissolving into rhythm as incantatory repetitions ("go Rimbaud - go Rimbaud go - Rimbaud") become decreative practice, until something else speaks through. Tarkovsky flooding a house to film memory's architecture, waiting hours for the light to move across water… This is prayer as pure expenditure, creation that refuses the economy of recognition.

“The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.”

— Simone Weil, Waiting on God ²

When Weil writes that beauty is "a trap set by God to make the soul consent to receive him," she reveals creativity's violence: how it demands we be wounded by reality before we can witness it. The artist becomes a nail whose head alone stops the violin string from vibrating. Minimum presence, maximum disruption. Light, Otherwise proposes that genuine creative practice operates through what Weil termed "supernatural use of suffering": not suffering's glorification but its transformation through attention into aperture. Every creative act performs this paradox: to make something that unmakes the maker, to produce presence through practiced absence. We are not speaking of quietism or withdrawal - Weil died of tuberculosis aggravated by refusing food in solidarity with occupied France, her attention was militantly material. So too with creation: it must engage matter's full resistance, must know the weight of pigment, the stubbornness of language, the way film emulsion holds and releases light, and ultimately recognize its place in the world, alongside mankind's grandeur and catastrophe.To speak only of what leaves you speechless - this is the parallel prayer, each attempt running alongside others without convergence. Not communication but communion. The light enters otherwise, not through sovereignty but through the cracks it leaves when it fails.