Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She gave me a smile, and lifted her yellowed fingers to fiddle with the crystal drop that hung, on a brass thread, from the hole in her ear. ‘All old tenants of mine, my dear,’ she said; ‘and some of them, as you will see, rather famous.’I looked at the pictures again. They were all, I now saw, portraits - signed portraits most of them - of artistes from the theatres and the halls. There were, as Mrs Dendy had claimed, several faces that I knew - the Great Vance, for instance, had his photograph upon the chimney-breast, with Jolly John Nash, posed as ‘Rackity Jack’, at his side; and above the sofa there was a framed song-sheet with a sprawling, uneven dedication: ‘To Dear Ma Dendy. Kind thoughts, Good wishes. Bessie Bellwood’. But there were many more that I did not recognise, men and women with laughing faces, in gay, professional poses, and with costumes and names so bland, exotic or obscure - Jennie West, Captain Largo, Shinkaboo Lee - I could guess nothing about the nature of their turns. I marvelled to think that they had all stayed here, in Ginevra Road, with comely Mrs Dendy as their host.We talked until the tea was drunk, and our landlady had smoked two or three more cigarettes; then she slapped her knees and got slowly to her feet.‘I dare say you would like to see your rooms, and give your faces a bit of a splash,’ she said pleasantly. She turned to Mr Bliss, who had risen politely, when she had. ‘Now, if you could just apply your obliging arm to the young ladies’ boxes and things, Wal ...’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The crowd laughed - and listened more carefully to her next song, and clapped more briskly when she finished it. When, a little later, another man tried to call for Nibs, he was shushed by his neighbours; and by the time Kitty got round to her ballad and her bit of business with the rose the hall was on her side, attentive and appreciative. From my station at the side of the stage I watched her in wonder. When she stepped into the wing, weary and flushed, and her place was taken by a comic singer, I put my hand upon her arm and pressed it hard. Then Mr Bliss appeared with Mr Ling the manager. They had been watching from the front, and looked very satisfied; the former took Kitty’s hand in both of his and shook it, crying, ‘A triumph, Miss Butler! A triumph, if ever I saw one.’ Mr Ling was more restrained. He gave Kitty a nod, then said, ‘Well done, my dear. A difficult crowd, and you handled it admirably. Once the band has grasped the pacing of your business and your strolls - well, you will be splendid.’ Kitty only frowned. I had brought a towel with me from the change-room, and this she now caught up, and pressed to her face. Then she took her jacket off, and handed it to me, and unfastened the bow-tie at her throat. ‘It wasn’t so good,’ she said at last, ‘as I might have wished it. There was no — fizz, no sparkle.’ Mr Bliss gave a snort, then spread his hands. ‘My dear, your first night in the capital! A theatre larger than you have ever worked before! The crowd will come to know you, word will spread. You must be patient. Soon they will be buying tickets just for you!’ At that I saw the manager glance his way through narrowed eyes; but Kitty, at least, allowed herself to smile. ‘That’s better,’ said Mr Bliss then. ‘And now, if you’ll permit me, ladies, I believe a light little supper would be welcome. A light little supper - and, perhaps, a heavy large glass with some of that fizz in it, Miss Butler, that you seem so keen on.’ The restaurant to which he took us was a theatre people’s one, not very far away, and filled with gentlemen in fancy waistcoats just like himself, and with girls and boys like Kitty, with streaks of greasepaint on their cuffs and crumbs of spit-black in the corners of their eyes. He seemed to have a friend at every table, every one of whom saluted him as he passed by; but he did not pause to chat with them, only waved his hat in general greeting, then led us to an empty booth and called to a waiter for a recitation of the bill of fare.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The book you are reading is my story. It is not a biography of Terence Hanbury White. But White is part of my story all the same. I have to write about him because he was there. When I trained my hawk I was having a quiet conversation, of sorts, with the deeds and works of a long-dead man who was suspicious, morose, determined to despair. A man whose life disturbed me. But a man, too, who loved nature, who found it surprising, bewitching and endlessly novel. ‘A magpie flies like a frying pan!’ he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles. ‘There is a sense of creation about it,’ he wrote, in wonderment, after helping a farmer deliver a mare of a foal. ‘There were more horses in the field when I left it than there were when I went in.’ In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either. When, on their final meeting, he confessed to the writer David Garnett that he was a sadist, Garnett blamed White’s early emotional maltreatment and years of flogging at school. ‘He was an extremely tender-hearted and sensitive man,’ Garnett wrote, who had ‘found himself always in the dilemma of either being sincere and cruel, or false and unnatural. Whichever line he followed, he revolted the object of his love and disgusted himself.’

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  31°, Wa Ib 35°+ 3 t.; 10: aN Pr 18" + 5 t.; 84 יִנְבְהוּ‎ Ez 31%, WAN Ib 367, WAM Je 13”, תִנְבְּהִינָה‎ Ez 16°; Inf. 9233 103", לְנְבְחָה‎ 0 —1. be high, lofty, tall, e.g. tree Hz 19" 31°, heavens Jb 35° Is 55° ~ 103", man 1 S10”. 2. be exalted, of man in dignity and honour Jb 36’, of servant of Yahweh Is 52", God Is 5°, God’s waysIs55°. 3. lofty tap גָּבָהּ‎ :—a. in a good sense, encouraged in the ways of Yahweh 2 Ch 17°; b. elsewhere in a bad sense, be haughty weigh, Pr 187 2 Ch 26" 32” Bz 287" ‘and so without לב‎ Is 3" Je x3" Ez 16 Zp3". Hiph. Pf. Mia Ez 17"; Impf. Par Tb 397 Je 49" Ob*; MPEP. 2 Ch 33%; wae Ibs’; Inf. M30 Is 7" Ez 21; Pt. Pa Pr 17” 113° ;-- make high, exalt, e.g. trees Ez 17™, wall 2 Ch 33", gate Pr 17”, nest Je 49° Ob‘, dwelling yw 103°, a request Is 7", the lowly Ez 21°); FY IVAN make their flight high, soar aloft Jb 5’, without עוף‎ Jb 397. Tra adj. high, exalted—1 S ("+ 15 t.; Mad ץ‎ 138°; cstr. TH 1 ₪ 167; AI. (Ew!?*) y +*נסז‎ 3 t.; pl. O23 Ee 574 5 +.;)1( N93 Dt 3°+6t.; pl. MIN} Dn 8*+ 2+.; גָּבהת‎ Dt 28; —-1. high, lofty, tall, e.g. tree Ez 17™, tower 18 2” Zp 1, mountain Gn 7° y 104" Is 409 577 Ez 14” 40°; ef. phrases כל גבעה גבהה‎ by upon every high hill 1K 148 2K 17" 162%; על גבעות‎ הגבהות‎ Je17?; 73 עַלבָּלדהַר‎ Is 30” Je 3°; man 189°; tree M24) 723 Ez 31°; horns Dn 8°; walls Dt 3° 28°; gallows Est 5 7°; gate Je 51°; altar Ez 41”; high things Jb 41% Ec12°. 2. exalted in station Ez 213}; We מַעַל גה‎ 73-92 pay DI for high one above high one 8 watching, § the Most High over them Ec 5’ so Ew 220 al., but Vrss De Now al. higher (earthly), potentates over them. 3. haughty 138° Is5” 10% ז‎ 82%; DPA ג' לב סז‎ Pr 165; ג' רוח‎ 106 "ל‎ 4. n.[m.] loftiness, in2ip גָבה‎ 1 ₪ 16' ; cf. bina 10, p. 153. THDA nm. height—Jb22” + 9t.; sf. 17123 1 ₪ 17*+ 5 5; pl. estr. 723 Jb 118;—1. height, of buildings and trees Ez1™® 19" 311° 40 41° 2 Ch 3* Am 2%; prob. also Ez 43” (of altar), so 6( Ew Co for MT 33 (q.v.); of man 1817; heaven Jbr1® 22” גבה)‎ estr. SI° of rock). 2. exaltation, grandeur Jb 40”. 3. haughtiness, ue at AN ץ ג'‎ 10% 12973 2 Ch 32%; 73 דיצ‎ A 1 גּבְהוּת‎ n.f. haughtiness, Is 2", THAN npr. (exalted? O1°2"*) place in | 147 גבול the tribe of Gad Nu 32* Ju 8";—AHirber- Ajbchat, NW. fr. ‘Amman, Bd ™2®, Vrss. Codd.‏ הַגּדוּל Jos 157 Kt; rd.‏ (ה)גבול cf. v'?.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  he will appear in his glory y 102”, his glory will be revealed in a march through the wilder- ness to the holy land Is 40°, the land will see it Is 35°, shine with it Ez 43°, and it will dwell in the land y 85"; it will be to the rearward of Israel Is 58°; it will arise and be seen upon Jerusalem 18 6075; Yahweh will be the glory in the midst of her Zc 2°; the temple will be filled with it Hg 2‘; the earth wiil be filled with a knowledge of it Hb 2", and. with it Nu 147 (JE) ץ‎ 729 it will be declared among the nations and all will see it Is 66" 0" and peoples and kings revere 15 ~ 102° Is 59"; ו"‎ will reign before his elders in glory Is 24%; the resting-place of the Messiah will be 1123 ₪ "דד‎ withhold from honour Nu 247 (E); 22 ירר‎ descend from Je 48%; אחר ב"‎ now send after mez’; 22 ON y 112°; שבב בכ'‎ Is 145; כ'‎ Jon Pr29*; כ'‎ 721 Dn11*; ב'‎ np» take me to honour ¥ 73%; not becoming to fools Pr 26%; ’3 לפנו‎ may before honour (g eth) humility Pr 15* 18”; antithesis nop Hog’ Hb 2" Pr 3%, ודד" קיקלון‎ 722 is used as collective, of honoured men, dignitaries, nobility 2x כבוד‎ 311 1% elsewhere as estr. before various nations or vue sfs. only ms 5° 87 ro 16% 175* 21 22%. 4. honour, ation, of character, of man ולאדלף לבי‎ 2 Ch 26" neither will it be for thine honour; || חכמה‎ Ec ro’; צדקה‎ Pr21”; antith. m3 v4; M33 כָּברֶם‎ 4PM Pr 257 and archon out of their glory is (not) glory ב' לאיש‎ Pr 20°; בי אֶלְהִים‎ 923 וכ' מְלָכִים חקר‎ 737 WAT Pr 25? the honour of God is to conceal a thing, but the honour of kings is to search out athing. 5. my honour, poet. of the seat of honour in the inner man, the noblest part of man || כפשי‎ Gn 49° (poem) +" a) ץצ‎ 16° 108°; it is called upon to זמר‎ ¥ 30% (rd. 133 for W123); ץ ערה‎ 57. 6. honour, reverence, glory, as due to one orascribed to one: a. of men, due to a father Mal 1°; honour done to David by Nathan’s prophecy Ch 17"; > עשה ב'‎ 2 Ch 32% do honour to; נתן כ' ל‎ Pr 26% .מ .62% ישע||‎ of God, "122 the honour due to me (Yahweh) Is 42° 437 48" JOY צ כ'‎ Di נתן כ‎ 186° 16135 Mal 2? W115); כ' ל‎ py Jos 7° ₪0 שים כ" ;425 פד‎ ץ יהב כ' ועז ל ;667 ץ תהלתו‎ 2.96 = 06% ץ יהב ב' שָמוּ ל‎ 29? 96*=1 Ch 16%; זמר כ' שָמו‎ ספר כבורו בגוים ץש‎ 065= 1 Ch 16% ; אמר‎ נתן כבודי בנוים ;145% ץש ב' מלכוחך‎ Ez 397; , ץש 728 בָּבוּד‎ 29° say Glory; ‘22 עזי‎ exult with

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  anew Ez 27° ships of Tarshish were thy travellers (i.e. traders), but improbable; Krae = שַרות לְךּ‎ journey for thee with thy wares; Toy 2 M224 > Co PNW served thee. n.f. gift, present )1( (fr. above /‏ תַשוּרַה1 thing brought, offered? very dubious) ;—‏ = ‘n1S9/ ee inferred from context).‏ TIL ושוּר]‎ vb. behold, regard (esp. Jb) ;-- Qal Impf. 3 ms. WA Je 5°, sf. BRC Tb 34°, 6%6.; Imv. ms. WY Jb 35°;—1. behold, c. ace. pers. Nu 23° 247 (poems in JE, || 78), לא'‎ תִּשוּרְנִי‎ , subj. eye, 15 2447, and (=I shall not exist) 7°, cf. 20° (subj. 17D), 17°; God object 347 35"; look, gaze, abs., [> loc. Ct 4°. 2. regard with כ‎ care (subj. (י"‎ Ho 14°; so, =notice, Jb35"°; regard, observe, ace. rei, God’s word 1033 * (Hi De Da al.), so, (reading 2 ms.), Siegf Bu; Du 332° he (God) retracts it not. 3. watch stealthily, lie in wait, עלְבָּרְף אָשוּר‎ 123 Ho ךז‎ (subj. ; Meinh Marti PUN ; GSBWe Now al. ,(אשור‎ Je 5% (subj. wicked). -- 33” v. .שיר‎ TW. +1. [VW] dub. word, only pl. sf. °2Y BBM WA y 925 read ‘THA (Bae al.) v. foll. 1 שורר]‎ [ n.m. (insidious) watcher, (prop. P61. Pt., "2 om., Ges'™*);—pl. sf. שוררי‎ y 56%, שררי 7% שוררי‎ 547 59"; 92” v. foregoing. (of foll.; Ar. 5 (5) is become‏ שור זז BH,‏ == שור raised, excited, leap, spring ; NH‏ SabDenkm << '-* DHM 6 -‏ + חור(ן) =Sab.‏ תורא Aram. 819, |50 ; Nab.‏ ל 0 as n.pr.m. Lzb*™ (Gk. 700005, Lat. taurus, Eng.‏ steer); As. 807%, Eth. QC:).‏

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But not entirely, because the book, in a different form, was still being finished, and the hawk would not be lost for ever. At the beginning of The Sword in the Stone Sir Ector’s son Kay takes the Wart out hawking. He picks up Cully the goshawk from the castle mews – an unwise thing to do, for the hawk is deep in the moult and wildly out of condition. After a half-hearted sally at a rabbit the hawk takes stand on a high branch and ignores their calls. They follow it from tree to tree, whistling and luring, but the hawk is in no mood to return. Kay flies into a temper and storms home, but the Wart stays with the hawk, because he cannot bear it to be lost. He follows it into the deep wildwood, and there he is afraid. Reading The Sword in the Stone after reading The Goshawk is a deeply curious thing. You start to confuse which forest is which. One is the tangled wildwood of Arthur’s Britain, a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men. The other is the tangled forest around Stowe. It too is a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men, the place White hoped would give him the freedom to be who he was. Like the forest in Sir Orfeo, the forests of White’s imagination exist in two worlds at once, and it is into these strange, doubled woods that the lost hawk leads the Wart. In following it, the boy is drawn to his destiny, just as White had been drawn to his own by looking for Gos. Night falls. The Wart sleeps under a tree, and the next morning he comes across a high-gabled stone cottage in a clearing in the wood. Outside it, drawing water from a well, is a tall elderly man with spectacles and a long white beard, wearing a gown splashed with mutes and embroidered with stars and leaves and mystical signs. It is his teacher, Merlyn the magician, and when the Wart walks into his cottage he finds it is a treasury of wonderful things: thousands of books, stuffed birds, live grass snakes in an aquarium, baby badgers, an owl called Archimedes. There is Venetian glass, a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, paint-boxes, fossils, a bottle of Mastic varnish, purse-nets and rabbit-wires, a rod-box, salmon flies, and a fox’s mask mounted on the wall. Nearly all of these things were in White’s cottage as he wrote.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  She preferred a gentler portrait of my father. She would tell the story of when he arrived to accept his Phi Beta Kappa key in his favorite outfit—jeans and an old knit shirt with a leopard-print pattern. “Nobody told him it was this big honor, so he walked in and found everyone standing around this elegant room dressed in tuxedos. The only time I ever saw him embarrassed.” And Gramps, suddenly thoughtful, would start nodding to himself “It’s a fact, Bar,” he would say. “Your dad could handle just about any situation, and that made everybody like him. Remember the time he had to sing at the International Music Festival? He’d agreed to sing some African songs, but when he arrived it turned out to be this big to-do, and the woman who performed just before him was a semi-professional singer, a Hawaiian gal with a full band to back her up. Anyone else would have stopped right there, you know, and explained that there had been a mistake. But not Barack. He got up and started singing in front of this big crowd—which is no easy feat, let me tell you—and he wasn’t great, but he was so sure of himself that before you knew it he was getting as much applause as anybody.” My grandfather would shake his head and get out of his chair to flip on the TV set. “Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.” That’s how all the stories went—compact, apocryphal, told in rapid succession in the course of one evening, then packed away for months, sometimes years, in my family’s memory. Like the few photographs of my father that remained in the house, old black-and-white studio prints that I might run across while rummaging through the closets in search of Christmas ornaments or an old snorkle set. At the point where my own memories begin, my mother had already begun a courtship with the man who would become her second husband, and I sensed without explanation why the photographs had to be stored away. But once in a while, sitting on the floor with my mother, the smell of dust and mothballs rising from the crumbling album, I would stare at my father’s likeness—the dark laughing face, the prominent forehead and thick glasses that made him appear older than his years—and listen as the events of his life tumbled into a single narrative.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Which brings us to Toni Cade Bambara. She taught us many things, but I keep coming back to her task to writers/artists to “make the revolution irresistible.”21 Bambara taught us to say yes to ourselves, to a future that included our whole selves. She did this by being intact in public: complex and multitalented and vulnerable. Alexis Pauline Gumbs will help us all see the wholeness of Bambara. To round out the lineage, I am including two pieces on pleasure philosophy. The first is a piece on pleasure politics from Joan Morgan. I remember hearing that Morgan was rocking with a crew called the Pleasure Ninjas and then learning that they were the badass Black academics that I wanted to be when I grew up, even though I lacked the particular gene that makes one pursue advanced degrees and teaching. This piece feels foundational to the work we’ll explore in these pages. Years later, I heard my Detroit afrofuturist comrade Ingrid LaFleur speak to an aligned approach to life, a pleasure philosophy that was shaping her choices, family, fashion, and future. So there’s a brief interview with her. There are some other people I just need to mention in the pleasure activism lineage. Writers like Anaïs Nin, Erica Jong, Andrea Dworkin, and Alice Walker changed my mind about what sex could be, what my body was for, shifting the very definition of being sexually liberated outside of a framework of wanting or needing men. But at the same time, I learned from Samuel R. Delany to engage the future through desire, through the queer body. Delany has had thousands of lovers and has written some of the most sensual otherworldly sex that has ever been put on a page. I learned from Frida Kahlo the pleasure of public self-love. Kahlo taught me to find my own beautiful, to be curious about my own face, to be unafraid to stand out, and to be true to my and our capacity for genius. I learned from my aunt Margaret about the pleasures of fashion and home decor, bringing and colliding the brightest patterns and colors into everything—socks, textiles, shower curtains, muumuus. Keith Cylar, cofounder of Housing Works, was the first person I remember hearing the term pleasure activism from and also the person to show me that even in “professional” spaces you could be a sexual, drug-using grown-up who danced with your whole body every time you heard music. And that flirtation could be a part of great friendships. The other teachers I have on this path are in the pages that follow, as authors of essays, interviewees, or references. Hot and Heavy Homework

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I am the granddaughter of a woman who had seven children with a few men. She raised the children with the help of her family. She drank and kept a freezer full of pops that all the neighborhood kids could visit. I was never sure about how to think of my grandmother growing up. I felt kinship for her. I thought she was beautiful, fly, smelled good, felt soft. I remember her being generous. As I get older, I realize how sexually liberated she was for her time. She didn’t give up on sex or love, even though it was a struggle for her. She kept finding lovers, kept finding ways to feel good as a southern Black hotel maid. I want to honor her as the first person in my personal pleasure lineage. The next person of significance is Octavia Butler. This book is the third one I’ve worked on that roots back into Butler’s work. The first was Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, in which I worked with Walidah Imarisha to gather visionary fiction in the lineage of Butler—fiction that understands it is not neutral, that seeks to evolve the status quo by centering those communities traditionally marginalized by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. The second book was Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, in which a lot of my comrades and I explored the adaptive, relational leadership that so many of Butler’s protagonists displayed, finding models in complex science and the natural world. This third book is inspired in part by the ways in which Butler’s characters often find the way beyond evolutionary obstacles with physical pleasure and symbiotic communities. It’s also inspired by the sheer pleasure I get reading and rereading Butler and other science fiction writers, stretching my imagination out beyond the horizon. I write more later in this book about the ways Butler turns me on. While Butler is a core root of this work, I had to include, in full, with some of my own annotation, Audre Lorde’s life-changing essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” This essay was published a few days before I was born, on August 25, 1978. I first read and heard it in college.18 Lorde shared what she had learned about the ways the power of the erotic makes us “give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering, and self-negation.”19 I am aware that Lorde uses the language of the erotic, which specifies the pleasures and aliveness associated with sex. I love the erotic, and it’s all over this book, but I also wanted to broaden the scope to all the experiences that bring us happiness, aliveness, transcendence—which is why this is pleasure activism and not erotic activism. The place where it all comes together, for me, is the orgasmic yes.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And then my work expanded in my twenties. It wasn’t just about family violence. This is about structural violence too and about how I relate to myself through desire when I am deeply undesirable, I am expendable, and I am only here for labor or reproduction? And … then what is my erotic self in that, when you’re devoid of being able to define yourself outside of capitalism and white supremacy? So she touches on all of these things, right? I mean this is a fucking mantra. Because it says, first, how can I be a creator? How can I trust that I am worthy of defining desire and pleasure and liberation as myself or in relationship to other Black lesbians, Black queer women of color, trans and gender-nonconforming folks of color? That reality seemed untouchable when I was coming into my own, until she spoke these words. My truth. In my late teens, I found the Audre Lordes and the James Baldwins and the Toni Cade Bambaras and the Essex Hemphills and the Marlon Riggses, the Pat Parkers, the Cherríe Moragas, Gloria Anzaldúas, Jewelle Gomezes, and more. All these, they were more than people. They were saints in my reality. Black lesbian leaders like Fran White were my teachers, literally my teachers, who I had the opportunity to learn from, to see them embody power and transformation as my teachers in college. And I was amazingly anointed by the breadth of a canon of Black lesbian feminism that I came into, one that is very much defined by pleasure and power in relationship to our lived experience. And of course, Barbara Smith lives and breathes this too. amb. That’s the lineage! It feels kind of like you had been this stream making your way through the boulders and down the mountain, to this very fast-moving river. I can feel that rolling along into this … Black and Brown brilliance. Decolonizing. Deconstructing. Cara. And it felt like they were constellations. We were constellations. I’ve written several pieces using that analogy of maps and constellations and being cartographers. Harriet Tubman as an architect and a cartographer. Audre Lorde as an architect and a cartographer. And what’s that called—when you read the stars? … an astrologer. Yes, astrologers for life. So I don’t know if that answers your question. I want to say also: when I did performance theater, political theater in the nineties, there wasn’t a lot out there. You had, of course, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls.37 That changed my fucking life. That changed all little Black girls’ lives. Right? Then I met her and realized, oh, you could talk like that too. You could talk like poetry. Who cares if anyone doesn’t understand you. Roll with it. I was like, go ’head with your bad self. And I found my place of power and righteousness in language.

• From Prayers of the Social Awakening (1910)

  rejoice in the men of genius and intellectual vision who discern the undis- covered applications of thy laws and dig the deeper springs through which the hidden forces of thy world may well up to the light of day. We claim them as our own in thee, as members with us in the common body of humanity, of which thou art the all-per- vading life and inspirer. Grant them, we pray thee, the divine humility of thine elect souls, to realize that they are sent of thee as brothers and helpers of men and that the powers within them are but part of the vast equipment of humanity, entrusted to them for the common use. May they bow to the law of Christ and live, not to be served, but [67] mm 11 to give their abilities for the emancipation of the higher life of man. Save them from turning thy revelations into means of extor- tion and from checking the toilsome march of humanity till they take toll. But to us who benefit by their work do thou grant wisdom and justice that we may not suffer the fruit of their toil to be wrested from them by selfish cimning or the pressure of need, but may assure them of their fair reward and of the meed of love and honor that is the due of those who have served humanity well. Gladden us by the glowing consciousness of the one life that thinks and strives in us all, and knit us together into a commonwealth of brothers in which each shall be heir of all things and the free ser- vant of all men. AND MUSICIANS THOU who art the all-pervading glory of the world, we bless thee for the power of beauty to gladden our hearts. We praise thee that even the least of us may feel a thrill of thy creative joy when we give form and substance to our thoughts and, beholding our handiwork, find it good and fair. We praise thee for our brothers, the masters of form and color and sound, who have power to unlock for us the vaster spaces of emotion and to lead us by their hand into the reaches of nobler passions. We rejoice in their gifts and pray thee to save them from the temptations which beset their powers. Save them from the discour- agements of a selfish ambition and from the vanity that feeds on cheap applause, from the snare of the senses and from the dark phantoms that haunt the listening soul. Let them not satisfy their hunger for beauty with tricks of skill, turning the art of God into a petty craft of men. Teach [60]

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  A man whose life disturbed me. But a man, too, who loved nature, who found it surprising, bewitching and endlessly novel. ‘ A magpie flies like a frying pan!’ he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles. ‘ There is a sense of creation about it,’ he wrote, in wonderment, after helping a farmer deliver a mare of a foal. ‘There were more horses in the field when I left it than there were when I went in.’ In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘ Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either. When, on their final meeting, he confessed to the writer David Garnett that he was a sadist, Garnett blamed White’s early emotional maltreatment and years of flogging at school. ‘ He was an extremely tender-hearted and sensitive man,’ Garnett wrote, who had ‘found himself always in the dilemma of either being sincere and cruel, or false and unnatural. Whichever line he followed, he revolted the object of his love and disgusted himself.’ When White took up his position at Stowe in 1932 he was already expert at hiding who he was. For years he’d lived by the maxim Henry Green put so beautifully in his public-school memoir Pack My Bag : ‘ The safest way to avoid trouble if one may not be going to fit is to take as great a part as possible in what is going on.’ To gain approval, to avoid trouble, he had to mirror what was around him: it was how he had tried to win love from his mother as a child. It was a life of perpetual disguise. After leaving Cambridge with a First in English, White had decided to become a toff – that was the phrase he used. Snobbery ‘ is one of the best parlour games’, he explained to Potts, with light-hearted casualness, but it was a game with the highest of stakes.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Maybe that’s as much of a reason as the other reasons people began to confuse the two of us with each other, despite decades of difference in age and a noticeable variance in complexion. In the most vulnerable places of my growth, while I was clearing out internalized oppression, I was replacing it with internalized Kai. Kai curated our Day of Truthtelling march in a way that calibrated the need for silent reflection and mourning, with the need for poetry, with the need for dancing to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor,” and the need for shouting and call-and response in a way that I mimic daily in my meditation, poem-writing, dancing, mantra-chanting practice of loving this survivor, or as Kai would say, “Me, myself, personally.” In the foreword to This Bridge Called My Back, Toni Cade Bambara said “the most effective way to do it is to do it.”57 Kai finds pleasure in the papercuts of creating binder after binder, resource after resource, curriculum after curriculum, possible project after possible project for a movement that sometimes moves too quick to give much back. So the pleasure in the making has to be enough. Kai finds laughter in the incisive analysis of the worst, most pervasive monsters killing us. Kai stays up all night, so many nights, making things that just weren’t there the day before, visible or imaginable. She has this frenetic relationship to time and a cigarette-assisted alertness, like Toni Cade before her, that has taught me … not to smoke or stay awake but to understand that the possibility of this moment, the moment with a mess of sugar and beignets, the moment laughing on the porch swing, the moment looking for moss to borrow from the trees and wondering about why exactly the trees in the park in New Orleans have cement filling their openings, the moment disagreeing about the movie that might be brilliant or just torture, the moment one of us is recording one of us painting and talking about mothering, the moment sitting on the futon with the books under and behind it and next to it on both sides and with the succulent plants creeping close when I’m asking about Toni Cade Bambara, what exactly do you remember, and Kai remembers who she herself was at the time. Which is different than who she is now. And she loves that former self and this self with the same awake ferocity. Meaning whatever she learned from Toni Cade worked, is working. Dance until You Laugh until You Sing for Cara Page Cara Page has a laugh like a river that connects to an ocean that never ends. She did a lot to nurture that laugh, and I don’t know half of it. When she speaks her vision, she lowers her tone so the people in the ground and underwater can get in and harmonize. When she points her finger, the space crackles. Have you seen it happen?

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  A secretary buzzed, reminding Reverend Wright of his next appointment. We shook hands, and he agreed to have Tracy prepare a list of members for me to meet. Afterward, in the parking lot, I sat in my car and thumbed through a silver brochure that I’d picked up in the reception area. It contained a set of guiding principles—a “Black Value System”—that the congregation had adopted in 1979. At the top of the list was a commitment to God, “who will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become Black Christian activists, soldiers for Black freedom and the dignity of all humankind.” Then a commitment to the black community and black family, education, the work ethic, discipline, and self-respect. A sensible, heartfelt list—not so different, I suspected, from the values old Reverend Philips might have learned in his whitewashed country church two generations before. There was one particular passage in Trinity’s brochure that stood out, though, a commandment more self-conscious in its tone, requiring greater elaboration. “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness,” the heading read. “While it is permissible to chase ‘middleincomeness’ with all our might,” the text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the “psychological entrapment of Black ‘middleclassness’ that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘they’ instead of ‘US’!” My thoughts would often return to that declaration in the weeks that followed as I met with various members of Trinity. I decided that Reverend Wright was at least partly justified in dismissing the church’s critics, for the bulk of its membership was solidly working class, the same teachers and secretaries and government workers one found in other big black churches throughout the city. Residents from the nearby housing project had been actively recruited, and programs designed to meet the needs of the poor—legal aid, tutorials, drug programs—took up a substantial amount of the church’s resources. Still, there was no denying that the church had a disproportionate number of black professionals in its ranks: engineers, doctors, accountants, and corporate managers. Some of them had been raised in Trinity; others had transferred in from other denominations. Many confessed to a long absence from any religious practice—a conscious choice for some, part of a political or intellectual awakening, but more often because church had seemed irrelevant to them as they’d pursued their careers in largely white institutions.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Hunting in Maine is not obviously riven with centuries of class and privilege. There are no vast pheasant shoots here where bankers vie for the largest bags, no elite grouse moors or exclusive salmon rivers. All the land can be hunted over by virtue of common law, and locals are very proud of this egalitarian tradition. Years ago I read an article in a 1942 edition of Outdoor Life that stirred wartime sentiment by appealing to it. ‘One of my grandfathers came from northern Europe for the single reason that he wanted to live in a country where he could try to catch a fish without sneaking onto some nobleman’s property where the common people were excluded,’ one hunter explained. In fascist Italy and Germany, the article went on, hunting is limited to ‘the owners of estates, their guests, and the high and mighty’. It had to backpedal slightly, of course, for the same was true in Britain. ‘This is no slap at our courageous ally,’ it explained. ‘But we do not need her system of land management.’ What’s more, hunting is far more acceptable here than it is in Britain. One of my friends in Maine is Scott McNeff, a wiry and energetic firebrand who runs an ice-cream emporium in summer and spends the winter flying his hawks. He told me that few households in the whole state aren’t touched by the November deer hunt. Even if people don’t hunt deer themselves, everyone knows someone who does, and freezers across Maine are full of home-shot venison packaged and parcelled out for friends and families. People swap hunting stories here the way people swap drinking stories at home. Scott took us hawking yesterday with his male redtailed hawk, a first-year bird called Yoder. He’s a handsome beast: his crown and back are chestnut brown, his underparts milkglass white, sparsely marked with a gorget of spots and dashes. He’s not as well-armed as a gos; his toes are shorter, thicker, more like fists than Mabel’s armoured pianist’s fingers. He has nothing of a goshawk’s rangy, leopard-like hunch or contagious apprehension. His eyes are dark, his face mild and open. A thick-set, amiable hawk. An unflappable kind of hawk. And he has been borrowed from the wild. Yoder is a passage hawk, one who already knows how to hunt, who has in the weeks since leaving his nest had to learn a hundred different ways of encountering air and rain and wind and quarry, and learn them fast to survive. American falconers are permitted to trap and fly a bird like this over its first winter, and then release it in the spring to return to the wild and breed. Falconers here can do this because they are tested and licensed by the state. It’s a good system. I wish we had it at home.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The genius of Christianity exerted an influence, partly liberating, partly transforming, upon the Latin language and versification. Poetry in its youthful vigor is like an impetuous mountain torrent, which knows no bounds and breaks through all obstacles; but in its riper form it restrains itself and becomes truly free in self-limitation; it assumes a symmetrical, well-regulated motion and combines it with periodical rest. This is rhythm, which came to its perfection in the poetry of Greece and Rome. But the laws of metre were an undue restraint to the new Christian spirit which required a new form. The Latin poetry of the church has a language of its own, a grammar of its own, a prosody of its own, and a beauty of its own, and in freshness, vigor, and melody even surpasses the Latin poetry of the classics. It had to cast away all the helps of the mythological fables, but drew a purer and richer inspiration from the sacred history and poetry of the Bible, and the heroic age of Christianity. But it had first to pass through a state of barbarism like the Romanic languages of the South of Europe in their transition from the old Latin. We observe the Latin language under the influence of the youthful and hopeful religion of Christ, as at the breath of a second spring, putting forth fresh blossoms and flowers and clothing itself with a new garment of beauty, old words assuming new and deeper meanings, obsolete words reviving, new words forming. In all this there is much to offend a fastidious classical taste, yet the losses are richly compensated by the gains. Christianity at its triumph in the Roman empire found the classical Latin rapidly approaching its decay and dissolution; in the course of time it brought out of its ashes a new creation. The classical system of prosody was gradually loosened, and accent substituted for quantity. Rhyme, unknown to the ancients as a system or rule, was introduced in the middle or at the end of the verse, giving the song a lyrical character, and thus a closer affinity with music. For the hymns were to be sung in the churches. This accented and rhymed poetry was at first, indeed, very imperfect, yet much better adapted to the freedom, depth, and warmth of the Christian spirit, than the stereotyped, stiff, and cold measure of the heathen classics.1245 Quantity is a more or less arbitrary and artificial device; accent, or the emphasizing of one syllable in a polysyllabic word, is natural and popular, and commends itself to the ear. Ambrose and his followers, with happy instinct, chose for their hymns the Iambic dimeter, which is the least metrical and the most rhythmical of all the ancient metres. The tendency to euphonious rhyme went hand in hand with the accented rhythm, and this tendency appears occasionally in its crude beginnings in Hilary and Ambrose, but more fully in Damasus, the proper father of this improvement.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  At the same time he labored in Rome with the greatest zeal, by mouth and pen, in the cause of monasticism, which had hitherto gained very little foothold there, and met with violent opposition even among the clergy. He had his eye mainly upon the most wealthy and honorable classes of the decayed Roman society, and tried to induce the descendants of the Scipios, the Gracchi, the Marcelli, the Camilli, the Anicii to turn their sumptuous villas into monastic retreats, and to lead a life of self-sacrifice and charity. He met with great success. "The old patrician races, which founded Rome, which had governed her during all her period of splendor and liberty, and which overcame and conquered the world, had expiated for four centuries, under the atrocious yoke of the Caesars, all that was most hard and selfish in the glory of their fathers. Cruelly humiliated, disgraced, and decimated during that long servitude, by the masters whom degenerate Rome had given herself, they found at last in Christian life, such as was practised by the monks, the dignity of sacrifice and the emancipation of the soul. These sons of the old Romans threw themselves into it with the magnanimous fire and persevering energy which had gained for their ancestors the empire of the world. ’Formerly,’ says St. Jerome, ’according to the testimony of the apostles, there were few rich, few noble, few powerful among the Christians. Now it is no longer so. Not only among the Christians, but among the monks are to be found a multitude of the wise, the noble, and the rich.’... The monastic institution offered them a field of battle where the struggles and victories of their ancestors could be renewed and surpassed for a loftier cause, and over enemies more redoubtable. The great men whose memory hovered still over degenerate Rome had contended only with men, and subjugated only their bodies; their descendants undertook to strive with devils, and to conquer souls .... God called them to be the ancestors of a new people, gave them a new empire to found, and permitted them to bury and transfigure the glory of their forefathers in the bosom of the spiritual regeneration of the world."362

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  CHAPTER XVI. POPULAR WORSHIP AND SUPERSTITION. § 130. The Worship of Mary. Literature: The Works of the Schoolmen, especially, Damiani: de bono suffragiorum et variis miraculis, praesertim B. Virginis, Migne, 145. 559 sqq., 586 sqq., etc.—Anselm: Orationes et meditationes, de conceptu virginis, Migne, vol. 158.—Guibert of Nogent: de laudibus S. Mariae, Migne, 166. 537–579.— Honorius of Autun: Sigillum b. Mariae, Migne, 172. 495–518.—Bernard: de laudibus virginis matris, Migne, 183. 55 sqq., 70 sqq., 415 sqq., etc.—P. Lombardus: Sent., III. 3 sqq. Hugo de St. Victor: de Mariae virginitate, Migne, 176. 857–875, etc.—Alb. Magnus: de laudibus b. Mariae virginis, Borgnet’s ed., 36. 1–841.—Bonaventura: In Sent., III. 3, Peltier’s ed., IV. 53 sqq., 105 sqq., 202 sqq., etc.; de corona b. Mariae V., Speculum b. M. V., Laus b. M. V., Psalterium minus et majus b. M. V., etc., all in Peltier’s ed., XIV. 179–293.—Th. Aquinas: Summa, III. 27–35, Migne, IV. 245–319.—Analecta Hymnica medii aevi, ed. by G. M. Dreves, 49 Parts, Leipz., 1886–1906.—Popular writers as Caesar of Heisterbach, De Bourbon, Thomas à. Chantimpré, and De Voragine: Legenda aurea, Englished by William Caxton, Kelmscott Press ed., 1892; Temple classics ed., 7 vols. F. Margott: D. Mariologie d. hl. Th. v. Aquino, Freiburg, 1878.—B. Häusler: de Mariae plenitudine gratiae secundum S. Bernardum, Freiburg, 1901.—H. von Eicken: Gesch. und System d. mittelalt. Weltanschauung, Stuttg., 1887, p. 476 sqq.—K. Benrath: Zur Gesch. der Marienverehrung, Gotha, 1886.—The Histt. of Doctr. of Schwane, pp. 413–428, Harnack, II. 568–562, Seeberg, Sheldon, etc.—Schaff: Creeds of Christendom, I. 108–128. The artt. in Wetzer- Welte, Empfängniss, IV. 454–474, Maria, Marienlegenden, Marienfeste, vol. VIII., Ave Maria, Rosenkranz, and the art. Maria, by Zöckler in Herzog.— Mrs. Jamieson: Legends of the Monastic Orders.—Baring-Gould: Lives of the Saints, Curious Myths of the M. Ages.—Butler: Legends of the Saints. Ave coeleste lilium, Ave rosa speciosa Ave mater humilium, Superis imperiosa, Deitatis triclinium; hac in valle lacrymarum Da robur, fer auxilium, O excrusatrix culparum. Bonaventura, Laus Beatae Virginis Mariae.2007 The worship of the Virgin Mary entered into the very soul of mediaeval piety and reached its height in the doctrine of her immaculate conception. Solemn theologians in their dogmatic treatises, ardent hymn-writers and minnesingers, zealous preachers and popular prose-writers unite in dilating upon her purity and graces on earth and her beauty and intercessory power in heaven. In her devotion, chivalry and religion united. A pious gallantry invested her with all the charms of womanhood also the highest beatitude of the heavenly estate. The austerities of the convent were softened by the recollection of her advocacy and tender guardianship, and monks, who otherwise shrank from the company of women, dwelt upon the marital tie which bound them to her. To them her miraculous help was being continually extended to counteract the ills brought by Satan. The Schoolmen, in their treatment of the immaculate conception, used over and over again delicate terms2008 which in conversation the pure to-day do not employ.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He taught the purest doctrine, as a direct revelation of his heavenly Father, from his own intuition and experience, and with a power and authority which commanded unconditional trust and obedience. He rose above the prejudices of party and sect, above the superstitions of his age and nation. He addressed the naked heart of man and touched the quick of the conscience. He announced the founding of a spiritual kingdom which should grow from the smallest seed to a mighty tree, and, working like leaven from within, should gradually pervade all nations and countries. This colossal idea, had never entered the imagination of men, the like of which he held fast even in the darkest hour of humiliation, before the tribunal of the Jewish high-priest and the Roman governor, and when suspended as a malefactor on the cross; and the truth of this idea is illustrated by every page of church history and in every mission station on earth. The miracles or signs which accompanied his teaching are supernatural, but not unnatural, exhibitions of his power over man and nature; no violations of law, but manifestations of a higher law, the superiority of mind over matter, the superiority of spirit over mind, the superiority of divine grace over human nature. They are all of the highest moral and of a profoundly symbolical significance, prompted by pure benevolence, and intended for the good of men; in striking contrast with deceptive juggler works and the useless and absurd miracles of apocryphal fiction. They were performed without any ostentation, with such simplicity and ease as to be called simply his "works." They were the practical proof of his doctrine and the natural reflex of his wonderful person. The absence of wonderful works in such a wonderful man would be the greatest wonder. His doctrine and miracles were sealed by the purest and holiest life in private and public. He could challenge his bitterest opponents with the question: "Which of you convinceth me of sin?" well knowing that they could not point to a single spot.