The Other Name: Septology I-II

by Jon Fosse

there’s a place in the big heaviness that’s an unbelievably gentle shining light, like faith, yes, like a promise,

the idea is so stupid, so obviously stupid that you can’t even laugh, such obvious stupidity is nothing to laugh at,

people who think like that can’t have big thoughts about God,

baptism, child baptism, is all well and good but it’s for mankind’s sake, not for God,

you don’t need to be dipped in water to be baptized, you can also be baptized in yourself, by the spirit you have inside yourself, the other person you have and are, the other person you get when you’re born as a human being,

you can also be baptized in yourself, by the spirit you have inside yourself, the other person you have and are, the other person you get when you’re born as a human being,

every single baptism of this or that person is a baptism of everyone, that’s what I think, a baptism for all mankind, because everyone’s connected, the living and the dead, those who haven’t been born yet,

just as Christ lived, died, and was resurrected and was one with God as a human being that’s how all people are, just by virtue of being men and women in Christ, whether they want to be or not, bound to God in and through Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not, that’s how it is, it’s true either way,

everything leads to God, so that all religions are one, I think, and that’s how religion and art go together, because the Bible and the liturgy are fiction and poetry and painting, are literature and drama and visual art, and they all have truth in them, because of course the arts have their truth,

but when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me, yes, the ones like this picture, of him and her sitting there, to get rid of them in a way, be done with them, I’ve sometimes thought that that’s why I became a painter, because I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony,

and what I’m looking for in all my prayers is silence and humility, I think, yes, God’s peace,

there’s no big difference or distance between life and death, between the living and the dead, even though the difference can seem insurmountable it isn’t,

it’s in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to us,

the very word God says that God is real, I think, the mere fact that we have the word and idea God means that God is real, I think, whatever the truth of it is it’s at least a thought that it’s possible to think, it’s that too, even if it’s no more than that,

it’s just when things are darkest, blackest, that you see the light, that’s when this light can be seen, when the darkness is shining, yes, and it has always been like that in my life at least, when it’s darkest is when the light appears, when the darkness starts to shine,

someone lives and then he dies and that’s that, no more no less, Åsleik says and he’s probably right about that too, but then again maybe it isn’t so simple, because life isn’t something you can understand, and death isn’t either, actually to put it in other words it’s like in a weird way both life and death are things you can understand but not with thoughts,

but you believe in God and I don’t, he says, and I say what I always say, that no one can really say anything about God and that’s why it’s meaningless to say that someone does or doesn’t believe in God, because God just is, he doesn’t exist the way Åsleik imagines,

no one can say anything about God, but it is possible to think that without God nothing would exist, but because God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit, He is outside time and space, He is something we can’t think, He doesn’t exist, He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing, I say, and I say that no thing, no person, creates itself because it’s God who makes it possible for things to exist at all, without God there’s nothing,

it’s also wrong to say that God is nothing because at the same time He is all, everything all together, because what I think, I say, is that since nothing can exist without God sustaining it, without God having made it exist, given it being, as they put it, then it’s He who is, it’s He that everything has in common, yes, God says about Himself, about what we should call Him, that His name is I AM, I say

no one can think their way to God, I say Because either they can feel that God is near or they can’t, I say Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence, I say

when one of them was too much like the others, when there was one you could hardly tell apart from the others, then it was hard to read it, a poem had to have some kind of quality of its own in it to be worthwhile,

the sea is the biggest graveyard in the world, and maybe the best one too, someone says, yes, there’s more of God in the sea than in the earth on land,

it’s probably these moments when I’m sitting and staring into empty nothingness, and becoming empty, becoming still, that are my deepest truest prayers,