
wow
I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It’s as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one “understand”? One cannot.
(When I shall no longer exist, God will say: “I do a lot of things that everybody understands. There’s nobody left not to understand them.”)
Eugene Ionesco – Fragments of a Journal

Baroness Elsa. Enduring Ornament , 1917; Cathedral, 1918 and God , 1917.

simone weil
God wants to give us something, but cannot … because our hands are full – there’s nowhere to put it.

Mechthild of Magdeburg from How God Adorns the Soul with Suffering

Mechthild of Magdeburg.
Confession
Drifting from my left eye
A range of snowy mountains. Driving west
I reached the sunny foothills
By late morning. The houses were cruel
And all the same to me
Come from among the drifters and suicides
On the cold streets of Denver where I had met,
For only the second time, my teacher. He sat
At a window, creatures poured from his eyes. Heavenly
Creatures I had never seen arrived to him with the sun
Wrapped in a sparkling white linen napkin. I wore the bad disguise
Of pity or confession’s ruthless music. So he stabbed me
With a sun beam and my heart, in its welter
Of wounds and confusions, died and now waits
To be born into the next thing, elsewhere,
On that far shore upon which I could not gaze
Without death in its solitude addressing me
By the wrong name, without addressing myself to the inhuman
World of deer, stone, white pine and mountain hemlock
In the alien teeth of diamond starlight. God gave me
Eyes at birth, and the birth of his dear son,
As blind as a kiss or a sunbeam disguised
As a yellow school bus. God is fast at the foot
Of the weather-ravaged mountain beneath
Stars bursting from the inconsolable
Future of death’s million little windows
Always open. God is fast as the grasslands
Full of unseen birds.
—Ronnie Yates