Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant.

Make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

“We pray God to be free of God,” says the thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

So perhaps one doesn’t teach children about God so much as help them grow into what they already know,

as Saint Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand.

Time reigns; yet the kingdom of love is every moment, Whose citizens do not age in each other’s eyes. Vernon Watkins, “Taliesen and the Spring of Vision”

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

loneliness is a condition that God both eases and is.

The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

William Bronk

Bronk is all hedgehog. He knows one thing, which is that he does not truly know one thing.

Dickinson—do I even need to finish this sentence?

Yes

(Augustine: “If you think you have understood God, it is not God.”)

There isn’t an I or a world to know. There is something not known.

THE WORLD I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world; but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere. There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no. I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

Bronk

“It is better to say ‘I am suffering,’” writes Simone Weil, “than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’”

The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

To weep is to see.

To be is to bow.

they fished for a denominator, Common or uncommon; And could only summon up the fact that both were human.

Etheridge Knight

Why write poetry in a burning world? To train myself, in the midst of a burning world, to offer poems of love to a burning world. Katie Farris, “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World”

(Attention catalyzes existence: “The eye with which I see God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the eye with which God sees me.”)

“No greater clarity should be sought than reality permits.” Does it help at all that this quote comes from a renowned physicist? I expect not, for he—John Polkinghorne—is also a renowned believer.

It is true that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it, no one thinks to thank God. Emily Dickinson, Letters

Ifs eternally. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

we relapse into the vertiginous Ifs we are.

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.

Belief in God is an inclination to listen, but as we grow older and our freedom hardens, we hardly even want to hear ourselves … Robert Lowell, “No Hearing”

When I was young people used to say to me “Wait until you’re fifty. You’ll see.” I am fifty. I haven’t seen anything. Erik Satie, A Mammal’s Notebook

The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his most recent book Helgoland, has posited a theory that erases the distinction between the human mind and the natural world.

God hasn’t silenced Job. Job has silenced God.

One of Whitney’s biographers argues convincingly that Whitney’s life and mind anticipate us, who as a culture value self-reliance over piety, technology over poetry, know-how over knowledge.

This poem by Anne Carson is basically the Book of Job in eighteen lines. On the day that “make justice” appears in God’s planner, he starts doodling in the margin and, God’s being being what it is, raptures into time the world’s first dragonfly.

God’s justice and the beauty of the world are—to the eye that will rise to the sight, or to the eye that grace gives access—one thing.

In the Zohar, as Fanny Howe noted a hundred pages ago (entry thirty-six), zero is another name for God. That shape without beginning or end, that emptiness that is All.

Cannot Divide by zero