The God without a name

The God who is without a name is inexpressible, and the soul in its ground is equally inexpressible, as he is inexpressible.

Master Eckhart

A trip to Babylon

I took the bus to Babylon last night
wearing my cloak of greed.
Played the Whore of Anger for a while;
turned ugly in my own eyes.
It wasn’t nearly as much fun as they’d told me;
and the prices my dear.

*

 

Your ugliest face

The way your ugliest face
crowds out the others
to win friends
and influence people

The hidden God

- God is without name, for no one can say or understand anything of him… Hence if I say: ‘God is good’, this is not true. I am good, but God is not good… If I say further: ‘God is wise’, this is not true, I am wiser than he. If I say also: ‘God is a being’, this is not true; he is a being above being and a superessential negation. A master says: If I had a God whom I could know, I would not think him to be God…

- God becomes God when the creatures say: ‘God’.

Master Eckhart

That you amaze me

That you’re always here when I’m at my worst, when I’m too full of myself for consolation, when I’m satisfied that I’ve destroyed all the gates, when I poison the air with my breath, when I’m greedy for a world empty of everything but pleasure, when I’ve finally disgusted myself and refuse even my own help, that you brighten the hundred darknesses with invisible beams of light, that you embrace my fall, that you yield even when I don’t beg, that you admit me to your choirs though my voice is cracked, that you need me though my voice only adds to the world’s gibberish, that you lift my longings out of hell, that you breathe your mercy into my mouth, that you amaze me with unending, unwarranted grace.

The flowers of the summers of my youth

The moon was full and brash that night. We ran out and all around the silver. The nightscape was treacherous with mercury streams and shadows and branches, but we didn’t care. My God that shit was strong. I climbed a tree and jumped out into space and down from I don’t know how high and rolled and kept running I didn’t know where. The others shambled like mad wraiths across the meadow and stared up at the stars. I stopped and looked at them and gloom came down on me… I thought of how it would be if we were sober. We wouldn’t even be there. We’d be lounging somewhere, watching TV, playing pool. Or if we were there, we’d be strolling at random, kicking tufts, snorting when someone made a lame joke… It was either that or this and a grey world the next day. I took another pill and pretended I was a shooting star across the wild grass, and the rush to the brain blasted the questions in my head until I woke up the next morning, so I did the same the next night, except I did it alone, because no matter how high I got I hated the way the others got, hated looking at them.

Fragment

The thing she had always thought was most important - the one needful thing - was being destroyed by the society of which she was an active part. A society that embraced materialism, radical relativism, parody, the empty spectacle. But since she herself was a product of the ironic relativism of her age, it was extremely difficult to see beyond it and envision a society she wouldn’t feel stifled by. Nor had she ever been satisfied by the idea of ‘positive relativism’ in its various guises. She had always felt that there would be nothing to live for if there were no Absolute. (But the Absolute had died long before she was born, they said, all the wise people of her age, and the long chaos of self-regarding forms that had followed was itself being played out; the mirrors were cracking, and no one knew what waited behind them.)

The thirst

It is as if a man had a violent thirst. He could yet do something else but drink and could also think of other things; yet, whatever he did or with whomsoever he were together, whatever his intention or thought or work, the image of the drink will not leave him as long as his thirst lasts; and the greater his thirst, the more intense, the more interior, present and constant the image of the drink.

Master Eckhart (trans. Hilda Graef)

Note From A Room on Six Sentences

A Note From A Room has been put up on Six Sentences.

Another note will be published in the forthcoming Six Sentences book.

From the peak

The cloudless sky
in the mountain lake