Anxiety

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 Bestiary (2020)

  Outside, my mother approached the holes with a butterfly net in her hand, prodding dirt-mouths with the rod of it. But my holes were not traps: They didn’t shut around squirrels or stray cats, they weren’t triggered by anything but my voice. When they heard me coming, they lolled open, begging to be fed, and I could smell the rust on their breath, the blood. Sometimes, when they were bored, they inhaled birds out of the sky, sucking in a whole flock and spitting the bones at the moon. When my mother walked through the yard, the holes grew snails inside their mouths like blisters. When she tried to rebury the holes, they grew back in the morning, camouflaged in hats of moss. I sat on the letter to hide it from her. My tail pinned it down, flattening all of Ama’s words into the same sound. When my mother came in with the butterfly net, a hole gouged in it from the time my brother tried catching a raccoon, I asked her why I’d never met my fourth aunt. Whenever my mother called her sister, they spoke only in sentence-shards. My mother looked down, tearing the net off the rod like a wig, crumpling the fabric in her hands and tossing it over my head like a veil. There were dead flies floating in the folds of the netting, wings straining light through their mesh. You look like a bride, she said, turning me toward my reflection in the window. I made your fourth aunt’s veil out of a mosquito net. When she got married, it rose and flew her away. I said that protection from malaria was very important in a marriage. She laughed, plucking the net from my head, balling it in her hands. When she released it out the window, it opened into a parachute with no body attached, a ghost we watched go. * SHE’S BEEN DIGGING HOLES IN HER YARD TOO? AREN’T YOU WORRIED SHE’LL COME UP THROUGH THE ONES YOU’VE DUG? THAT SHE’S LOOKING FOR YOU? SHE’S DIGGING A HOLE FOR YOUR AGONG. I WOULD BE WORRIED. VERY WORRIED. DOES HE HAVE LIFE INSURANCE? AND WHAT DOES SHE MEAN BY “PLOTTING”? I HOPE SHE JUST MEANS SHE’S PICKED UP GARDENING. —BEN DAUGHTER Back to Ben The holes behaved like newborns, mouths open wide enough to swallow our hips, crying all night until the neighbors asked if we were running some kind of illegal orphanage, trafficking sound from the ground. My mother came out with a BB gun and shot them each in the mouth, but they spat the bullets back out and vacuumed the gun right out of her hands, inhaling her arms up to the elbows. My tail, too, was colicky, its stripes steel-bright with sweat.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  There’s a close-up of ten hoses spraying the flame at different angles, each one leashed to a different little man. Jie says the hoses look like alien penises. While she laughs, I watch the stretchers, scuttling in and out of the building like beetles. I wait for Jie to tell me. To tell me Ma must be inside there. To say Ma is ash. Or she can’t be, she is in our old house stroking a picture of our three sisters, she is on her knees in the next room praying, she is in the kitchen scraping away the mold that is our fault, she is undressing Ba in the bath and oiling his back. The reporter on-scene speaks too fast to understand. We scan the screen for a body count, but there is only the day’s temperature in the left corner. Jie shuts off the TV and we watch the last ghost-strand of static wriggle in the center of the black screen, then flatline. Jie tells me to go to bed. She thumbs the broken seam in our sofa, tugs at the thread. Go to bed, she says. I ask if Ma is inside there. She says, Sleep. I ask if she’s sure it’s the right factory. I mean the wrong factory. Jie shuts off the light, and we sleep together on the sofa, her chest pressed so deep into my back I feel her heart punching my shoulder blades, harder than anything I’ve ever been hit with, louder than what we know how to say. Have you ever wished me dead? I forgive you for that, just as I want you to forgive me for what’s next. Ma comes home after six days, two days after the fire is put out. She hadn’t been at work. She hadn’t even left our block. She slept in the bathroom of the dollar store, locking it from the inside. All day she walked up and down the aisles, fingering pots of plastic putty and flipping the glazed pages of magazines, pretending she could read them. Finally, the employee told her to purchase or leave. Ma says yuanfen kept the fire caged from her, kept her corralled in the dollar store until the fire was done. When Jie and I first hear Ma knocking, we think it’s a debt collector and hide behind the couch. We know it isn’t the police: Ma has no ID that can confirm her identity. She has no face in this country, only a fire’s record of her body. Then we hear Ma calling our names, Ba’s. Her fist flying into the door like a dumb bird. We let her shout. We let her keep knocking with no one answering. It’s an entire minute before Jie climbs up from behind the couch, unlatches the door, presses her lips to our mother’s knees. It was easier to want her living when she was dead.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My brother and I tried hating him, but Duck Uncle’s Sichuan accent was honky and high-pitched and made us laugh until our throats tied themselves into bows. He even promised to teach us to hunt ducks, cutting targets out of shoeboxes and letting us shoot them with his BB gun. My brother had the best aim out of the three of us, threading the pellet through the penciled-in eye. I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe. _ In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying. Our mother bought us snorkel masks to wear outside, as if sipping air through a smaller opening would shrink the scent. We met after school in the backyard and drew holes in the dirt with our toes. The grass was a ghost of its former green, and most of it had been scalped away by the heat and our feet. In the grass we found trash that smelled recently deceased: soda can tabs, beer bottles with a piss-colored liquid living inside it. My brother said we probably wouldn’t find anything else, but I said the point was the hole itself. I’d learned that there were gases trapped in the soil wherever trash was buried, and if we didn’t dig holes for the ground to fart out its gas, this whole city would explode: Houses like knocked-out teeth. Blacktop rising as a crow flock. Tracing three more holes in the dirt, he asked me what color the gas was and I said, The same as our breath. That’s what made it lethal: Its taste camouflaged with our tongues. When it entered your lungs, it became a blade inside you. From the kitchen window, our mother watched as we plotted the rest of our holes. When we came in, she scrubbed us so raw we couldn’t sleep with the sheets on our skin. Still we kept digging, saving the city from its flatulent past. We dug with our hands and waited until evening when the smell of the landfill was only as bad as our breath. My brother kneeled first. He shaped his palms into bowls and flung fistfuls of soil onto a pile behind him.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When they heard me coming, they lolled open, begging to be fed, and I could smell the rust on their breath, the blood. Sometimes, when they were bored, they inhaled birds out of the sky, sucking in a whole flock and spitting the bones at the moon. When my mother walked through the yard, the holes grew snails inside their mouths like blisters. When she tried to rebury the holes, they grew back in the morning, camouflaged in hats of moss. I sat on the letter to hide it from her. My tail pinned it down, flattening all of Ama’s words into the same sound. When my mother came in with the butterfly net, a hole gouged in it from the time my brother tried catching a raccoon, I asked her why I’d never met my fourth aunt. Whenever my mother called her sister, they spoke only in sentence-shards. My mother looked down, tearing the net off the rod like a wig, crumpling the fabric in her hands and tossing it over my head like a veil. There were dead flies floating in the folds of the netting, wings straining light through their mesh. You look like a bride, she said, turning me toward my reflection in the window. I made your fourth aunt’s veil out of a mosquito net. When she got married, it rose and flew her away. I said that protection from malaria was very important in a marriage. She laughed, plucking the net from my head, balling it in her hands. When she released it out the window, it opened into a parachute with no body attached, a ghost we watched go. * SHE’S BEEN DIGGING HOLES IN HER YARD TOO? AREN’T YOU WORRIED SHE’LL COME UP THROUGH THE ONES YOU’VE DUG? THAT SHE’S LOOKING FOR YOU? SHE’S DIGGING A HOLE FOR YOUR AGONG. I WOULD BE WORRIED. VERY WORRIED. DOES HE HAVE LIFE INSURANCE? AND WHAT DOES SHE MEAN BY “PLOTTING”? I HOPE SHE JUST MEANS SHE’S PICKED UP GARDENING. —BEN MOTHER Journey to the West (II) Arkansas 1980 It’s summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks, like that time you were sick and threw up into your pillowcase and I sat all night beside you, emptying it every hour, wringing the sweat from your hair. I calculate that the road trip from Arkansas to California is four days total if we don’t pee. Jie and Ba and Ma and I are going to do it in three. Four is a bad omen to begin on.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I reached for Kitty, and pulled her to me. ‘I wish Walter were not waiting for us,’ I whispered - though, in truth, there was something rather thrilling about embracing her, in such a costume, with Walter so near and so unknowing. That thought - and the soundless kiss which followed it - made the trousers feel still stranger. When Kitty stepped away to see to her own suit, I looked at her a little wonderingly. I said, ‘How can you dress like this, before a hall of strangers, every night, and not feel queer?’ She fastened the clip of her braces, and shrugged. ‘I have worn sillier costumes.’ ‘I didn’t mean that it was silly. I meant - well, if I were to be beside you, in these’ - I took another couple of steps - ‘oh Kitty, I don’t think I should be able to keep from kissing you!’ She put a finger to her lips; then pushed at the fringe of her hair. She said, ‘You will have to get used to it, for Walter’s plan to work. Otherwise - well, what a show that would be!’ I laughed; but the words Walter’s plan had made my stomach lurch in sudden panic, and the laughter sounded rather hollow. I gazed down at my own two legs. The trousers, after all, were far too short for me, and showed my stockings at the ankle. I said, ‘It won’t do, will it, Kitty? He won’t really think that it will do - will he?’ He did. ‘Oh yes!’ he cried when we emerged at last together, all dressed up. ‘Oh yes, but what a team you make!’ He was more excited than I had ever seen him. He had us stand together, with our arms linked; then he made us turn, and do again the little stiff-legged dance that he had caught us at before. And all the time he walked about us with narrowed eyes, stroking his chin and nodding. ‘We shall need a suit for you, of course,’ he said to me. ‘A number of suits, indeed, to match Kitty’s. But that we can easily arrange.’ He took my hat from my head, and my plait fell down upon my shoulder. ‘Something must be done about your hair; but the colour, at least, is perfect - a wonderful contrast with Kitty’s, so the folk in the gallery will have no trouble telling you apart.’ He winked, then stood surveying me a little longer with his hands behind his head. He had removed his jacket. He wore a shirt of green with a deep white collar - he was always a fancy dresser — and the armpits of the shirt were dark with sweat. I said, ‘You really mean it, Walter?’ and he nodded: ‘Nancy, I do.’

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Until the early eleventh century, Jews had been fully integrated in Europe. 89 Under Charlemagne they had enjoyed imperial protection and held important public posts. They became landowners and craftsmen in all trades; Jewish physicians were much in demand. Jews spoke the same languages as Christians—Yiddish did not develop until the thirteenth century—and gave their children Latin names. There were no “ghettos”: Jews and Christians lived side by side and bought houses from one another in London until the mid-twelfth century. 90 However, during the eleventh century, there were rumors that Jews had persuaded the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim to destroy the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009, even though the caliph, who seemed to have been certifiably insane, had persecuted Jews and his fellow Muslims as well as Christians. 91 In consequence, Jews were attacked in Limoges, Orléans, Rouen, and Mainz. Linked with Islam in the Christian imagination, their position grew more precarious with each Crusade. After Richard I took the Cross in London in 1198, there were persecutions in East Anglia and Lincoln, and in York in 1193, Jews who refused baptism committed suicide en masse. The so-called blood libel, whereby the deaths of children were blamed on the local Jewish community, first surfaced when a child was killed in Norwich during the 1140s; there were similar cases in Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds, and Winchester (1192). 92 This wave of persecution was certainly inspired by a distorted Christian mythology, but it was also the product of social factors. During the slow transition from a purely agrarian to a commercialized economy, towns were beginning to dominate Western Christendom, and by the end of the twelfth century were becoming important centers of prosperity, power, and creativity. There were great disparities of wealth. Lowborn bankers and financiers were becoming rich at the expense of the aristocracy, while some townsfolk had not only been reduced to abject poverty but had also lost the traditional support structures of peasant life. 93 Money, in common use by the late eleventh century, came to symbolize the disturbing changes caused by this rapid economic growth that undermined the traditional social structure; it was seen as “the root of all evil,” and in popular iconography the deadly sin of avarice inspired visceral loathing and dread. 94 Originally Christians had been the most successful moneylenders, but during the twelfth century Jews had their lands confiscated and many were forced to become bailiffs, financial agents of the aristocracy, or moneylenders and were thereafter tainted by their association with money. 95 The Jew in Peter Abelard’s Dialogue (1125) explains that because Jews’ land tenure is so insecure, “the principal gain that is left for us is that we sustain our miserable lives here by lending money at interest to strangers. But that just makes us more hated by those who think that they are oppressed by it.” 96 Jews, of course, were not the only scapegoats of Christian anxiety.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The people would suffer if the laws kept changing, maintained the Legalist Han Feizi (c. 280–233), so a truly enlightened ruler “waits in stillness and emptiness” and “lets the tasks of themselves be fixed.” 110 He did not need morality or knowledge but was simply the Prime Mover, who remained immobile but set his ministers and subjects in motion: Having courage, he does not use it to rage He draws out all the warlike in his ministers Hence by doing without knowledge he possesses clear-sightedness By doing without worthiness he gets results By doing without courage, he achieves strength. 111 There was, of course, a world of difference between the two: Daoists deplored rulers who forced their subjects to conform to an unnatural fa; their sage king meditated to achieve selflessness, not to “get results.” 112 But the same ideas and imagery informed the thinking of political scientists, military strategists, and mystics. People could have the same beliefs yet act upon them very differently. Military strategists believed that their brutally pragmatic writings came to them by divine revelation, and contemplatives gave strategic advice to kings. Even the Confucians now drew on these notions: Xunzi believed that the Way could be comprehended only by a mind that was “empty, unified, and still.” 113 Many people must have been relieved when Qin’s victory put a stop to the endless fighting and hoped that the empire would keep the peace. But they had a shocking introduction to imperial rule. Acting on the advice of Prime Minister Li Si, the First Emperor became an absolute ruler. The Zhou aristocracy—120,000 families—were forcibly moved to the capital and their weapons confiscated. The emperor divided his vast territory into thirty-six commanderies, each headed by a civil administrator, a military commander, and an overseer; each commandery was in turn divided into counties governed by magistrates, and all officials answered directly to the central government. 114 The old rituals that had presented the Zhou king as head of a family of feudal lords were replaced by a rite that focused on the emperor alone. 115 When the court historian criticized this innovation, Li Si told the emperor that he could no longer tolerate such divisive ideologies: any school that opposed the Legalist program must be abolished and its writings publicly burned. 116 There was a massive book burning, and 460 teachers were executed. One of the first inquisitions in history had therefore been mandated by a protosecular state. Xunzi had been convinced that Qin would never rule China because its draconian methods would alienate the people. He was proved right when they rose up in rebellion after the death of the First Emperor in 210 BCE. After three years of anarchy, Liu Bang, one of the local magistrates, founded the Han dynasty.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life. 34 Zwingli and Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them. In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they chose—even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his own teaching. The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit. Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state, though his “secularist” vision was hardly irenic. God, he believed, had so retreated from the material world that it no longer had any spiritual significance. Like other rigorists before him, Luther yearned for spiritual purity and concluded that church and state should operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere. 35 In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole, which it had previously permeated. True Christians, justified by a personal act of faith in God’s saving power, belonged to the Kingdom of God, and because the Holy Spirit made them incapable of injustice and hatred, they were essentially free from state coercion. But Luther knew that such Christians were few in number. Most were still in thrall to sin and, together with non-Christians, belonged to the Kingdom of the World; it was essential, therefore, that these sinners be restrained by the state “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes so that it cannot bite and tear as it would normally do.” Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance. To attempt this would be like “loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everywhere.” 36 The only way the Kingdom of the World, a realm of selfishness and violence ruled by the devil, could impose the peace, continuity, and order that made human society feasible was by the sword. But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you know from past experiences that you have some triggers, it can help to name this up front and let your person know what they can do if you get triggered. This is also a good thing to ask a new lover: “Is there anything I might do that could trigger you?” Or, “If anything I’m doing doesn’t work for you, please say ‘stop’ or hold up your hands.” Take Time to Recover Let your breath return to normal, however long that takes. Notice if you are caught in a memory or if you are actually feeling unsafe in the present moment. Again, if you can speak, say “Something is coming up from my past, I need a moment.” If you can’t speak, closing your eyes can help you to establish a boundary around your attention and keep it on your own well-being and breath. Decide What to Share You are not obligated to disclose your past trauma. At this point, I generally assume that anyone I am beginning a situationship with has some sexual or other trauma in their history, and I try to be forthcoming about the fact that I do as well. But actually sharing the details of it in or right after the moment of trigger may not be appropriate for the connection or the moment or your healing. Or it might be exactly right. Some options: “I want to share more about my history of trauma with you but not right now.” Intimacy, yes, but I need time. This might include, “I’d like to continue—but can you avoid [if the trigger is a physical place or activity, name it as an emerging boundary]?” “Are you open to hearing about what’s coming up for me right now?” Hearing about other people’s trauma can be hard, even re-traumatizing for people. It can also be a swift transition from heavy petting to deep sharing. The connection may not be about that kind of depth, even if something is coming up in that moment. “I am feeling like myself again. I don’t want to talk about it. I would like to keep making out, if you’re down.” Sometimes the trigger is familiar, and once it passes I just want to keep going, not move into a big process moment. “Something is coming up for me‚ I’m not ready to share it, I think I [you] need to head home.” Let Your Body Follow Your Words/Desires If you want to leave or want your lover to go—make those moves. If you have a friend who can come and get you, call them up. You don’t need to drive when your system is taken over by trauma.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We are conceived from deceit. The second: Back on the island, Ba told me the moon was pregnant with a rabbit. You and your brother are obsessed with animal births. On the Animal Planet channel, you watch shows about animals that fuck outside of their species and give birth to babies that look like neither parent, that look more like unassembled pieces, bloodied and without a blueprint. Before you were born, I had dreams of giving birth to your head before the rest of your body. I thought I’d have to sew you together with floss, puzzle your bones back together. I understand animals that eat their runts. Better to swallow them back into your body than let them be taken, buried outside of you. You spend hours frying your eyes on a screen, sucking on suanmei and spitting the pits, impressed by 2-D animals that are 3-D where I’m born. The forest is lit by eyes, you say to the TV, which would be poetic if you weren’t wrong. That’s not a forest. It’s a jungle. You wouldn’t know the difference: A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death. I used to think our island floated on the sea like leaves, but nothing named a country is light enough. I say our island even though you were never with me: You’re here, watching bald-assed monkeys masturbate on TV. After the program on big cats, you and your brother decide to live nocturnally. Your brother’s learned at school that the sun is due to burn out someday, so we might as well live the darkness fully. We’re just pregaming the apocalypse, your brother says, lidding our windows with butcher paper. I’ve always wanted you to dodge the sun. Your brother is the light one, coin-bright, and you’re the rust clung to his side. I call every week and tell Ma to put Ba on the phone. I pretend to take out the trash so you won’t hear my voice, though the city is landfill anyway, and taking out the trash mostly means flinging it out the window. When you hear me speak to Ba, you look at me like you’re watching TV in a language you don’t speak. You move your mouth in sync with mine, trying to match the words to a preexisting key, but there are certain sorrows I’ve severed from you.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  When this was over, how to make my retreat was my concern; for, though I had been so extremely pleased with the difficult between this warm broadside, poured so briskly into me, and the tiresome pawing and toying to which I had owed the unappeased flames that had driven me into this step, now I was cooler, I began to apprehend the danger of contracting an acquaintance with this, however agreeable stranger; who, on his side, spoke of passing the evening with me and continuing our intimacy, with an air of determination that made me afraid of its being not so easy to get away from him as I could wish. In the mean time I carefully concealed my uneasiness, and readily pretended to consent to stay with him, telling him I should only step to my lodgings to leave a necessary direction, and then instantly return. This he very glibly swallowed, on the notion of my being one of those unhappy street-errants, who devote themselves to the pleasure of the first ruffian that will stoop to pick them up, and of course, that I would scarce bilk myself of the hire, by not returning make the most of the job. Thus he parted with me, not before, however, he had ordered in my hearing a supper, which I had the barbarity to disappoint him of my company too. But when I got home, and told Mrs. Cole my adventure, she represented so strongly to me the nature and dangerous consequences of my folly, particularly the risks to my health, in being so openlegged and free, that I not only took resolutions never to venture so rashly again, which I inviolably preserved, but passed a good many days in continual uneasiness, lest I should have met with other reasons, besides the pleasure of that rencounter, to remember it; but these fears wronged my pretty sailor, for which I gladly make him this reparation.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Even from her I felt distant, that night.So I was almost glad when, at about eleven o’clock, the mood of the party was changed, by Dickie calling for more light to be brought, for the lady on the piano to cease her playing, and for all the women present to gather round and pay attention.‘What’s this?’ cried one lady. ‘Why has it grown bright?’Evelyn said: ‘We are to hear Dickie Reynolds’ history, from a book written by a doctor.’‘A doctor? Is she ill?’‘It is her vie sexuelle!’‘Her vie sexuelle!’‘My dear, I know it already, it is terribly dreary ...’ This was from a woman who stood beside me in the shadows, garbed as a monk; as I turned to her she gave a yawn, then slipped quietly from the room in search of other sport. The rest of the guests, however, looked just as eager as Dickie could wish. She stood beside Diana; the book that Evelyn had referred to was in Diana’s hands - it was small and black and densely printed, with not a single illustration: it was not at all the kind of thing that people usually gave Diana, for her box. And yet, she was turning its pages in fascination. A lady dipped her head to read the title from the spine, then cried: ‘But the book’s in Latin! Dickie, whatever is the point of a filthy story, if the damn thing’s written in Latin?’Dickie now looked a little prim. ‘It is only the title that is Latin,’ she answered; ‘and, besides, it is not a filthy book, it is a very brave one. It has been written by a man, in an attempt to explain our sort so that the ordinary world will understand us.’A lady dressed as Sappho took the cigar from her mouth, and studied Dickie in a kind of disbelief. She said: ‘This book is to be passed among the public; and your story is in it? The story of your life, as a lover of women? But Dick, have you gone mad! This man sounds like a pornographer of the most mischievous variety!’‘She has taken a nom-de-guerre, of course,’ said Evelyn.‘Even so. Dickie, the folly of it!’‘You misunderstand,’ said Dickie. ‘This is a new thing entirely. This book will assist us. It will advertise us.’A kind of collective shudder ran right around the drawing-room.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She said the last letter felt incomplete, and we needed to metabolize metal this time. Metal, she told me, could be melted down into water, and the holes were always thirsting. We believed there were three letters, one for each daughter my Ama had left behind. All losses come in threes, Ben said, and I thought of my mother’s three toes in the cookie tin. When we lowered the cage into the 口, it took an hour for the hole to heal around it. Beneath the dirt, we heard the high whine of bars being wrenched, teethed apart, scoured of rust. I was worried about the shadow-bird suffocating while it was buried so far beneath the sky, but Ben said it was worth killing what was inside. We’d already sacrificed an entire goose. I told her not to remind me: These letters had too many casualties already. The 口 didn’t open for four days, and I told Ben to be patient: Metal was metabolized more slowly than meat. Ben said I should tell the holes a story: They’d open their ears to listen, and then we could reach into them and search. But I said I didn’t have any stories, especially if they were about Ama. She was the voice and I was the ear. Then tell one of your ama’s stories, Ben said. Every other night, my mother used the new landline to call Agong, but Ama was the one who picked up. Agong’s mind had unmarried all its memories, and sometimes he called to tell us the Japanese were invading and we should all find a well to hide in. The nights Ama made him sleep on the sidewalk, he’d duck under a chili bush and slug into the soil, awaiting whatever army was morning. When I was the one who picked up the phone, Ama gave me marriage advice: No mainland men, she said. Agong and my father were born in neighboring provinces, and look how they were now: My husband is gone in the head and your father is gone everywhere else. She said men were synonymous with missing. Then she told me to ward off boys by holding a skinned ginger root between my knees while I slept. I stole the ginger from my mother’s cabinet. It swelled with my sweat and chafed me hairless, but I ground myself against it until my crotch burned and it prickled to piss the next day. My mother said Ama was corrupting me, but the cure worked. Boys in the neighborhood veered their bikes away from me, and even my brother said his tongue burned whenever he spoke to me. Other times, Ama told me about stealing the neighbor’s chickens, slaughtering and skinning and cooking them so that there was no evidence of the crime. Ama was the one who taught me the laws of ownership: It’s yours if you were the one to birth it, she said. Or the one to kill it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But she is a lovely girl. Her husband was the kindest man, and Emma says she is just about despairing that she will ever find another to match him. The only men who want to court her turn out to be boxers ...’ I smiled dully; I was not much bothered about Mrs Costello, really. While Annie talked I kept glancing over to Florence. She now stood at the far side of the tent, a handkerchief gripped between her fingers but her cheeks dry and white. However long and hard I looked at her, she would not meet my gaze. I had almost decided to make my way over to her, when there came a sudden clamour: the lady on the platform had finished her speech, and the crowd was reluctantly clapping. This meant, of course, that it was time for Ralph’s address; Annie and I turned to see him hover uncertainly at the side of the little stage, then stumble up the steps as his name was announced, and take up his place at the front of the platform. I looked at Annie and grimaced, and she bit her lip. The tent had quietened a little, but not much. Most of the afternoon’s serious listeners seemed to have grown tired and left: their seats had been taken by idlers, by yawning women and by more rowdy boys. Before this careless crowd Ralph now stood and cleared his throat. He had his speech, I saw, in his hand - to refer to, I guessed, if he forgot his lines. His forehead was streaming with sweat; his neck was stiff. I knew he would never be able to project his voice to the back of the tent, with his throat so stiff and tense. With another cough, he began. “‘Why Socialism?” That is the question I have been invited to discuss with you this afternoon.’ Annie and I were sitting in the third row from the front, and even we could hardly hear him; from the mass of men and women behind us there came a cry - ‘Speak up!’ - and a ripple of laughter. Ralph coughed yet again, and when he next spoke his voice was louder, but also rather hoarse. “‘Why Socialism?”

• From The Art of Memoir

  down (nobody has yet). I keep pages private till the book’s done, and at the end, I send work out to folks I wrote about long before type’s set. As a side note, it’s not my nature to write at any length about people I don’t like. Save portraits of a grandmother who pissed me off and two pedophiles, it’s mostly love that drives me to the page. My son was in junior high when my second memoir came out, and he took a stance he held for more than a decade: “I’m not ready to read your books.” This strikes me as wise. It’s one thing to know your mother was sexually assaulted, quite another to read the graphic scene. He prefers me as a dispenser of waffles, not a literary figure. But there’s nothing in my stories he doesn’t know in rough outline—we’re close, and I’d never want him to hear family traumas from pals. With my last book, Lit, I had him vet the first chapter, because he appeared there in his then-current, college-age permutation. He changed nary a word. I’d have preferred that his father scrutinize that manuscript for accuracy, but he preferred the blurring of a pseudonym. (I did send those chapters to our former marriage counselor, just to see if she felt it fair.) Glib as I once was in suggesting Lucy Grealy piss off her own family, I was much like her before I set out to write about my less- than-perfect clan. As a single mom far from home, I dreaded pissing anybody off. Before I ever started Liars’ Club, I kept phoning my mother and sister (my daddy had passed) to take their pulses about the project and warn them about possible public scrutiny, should I be so lucky as to draw any. Part of me hoped they’d shoo me off. Much as I worshiped the form of memoir, the project’s prospect shot me through with dread. I felt compelled to write it, yet broke a sweat when I realized how easy it would be to do it wrong. Truth was, I had a financial flamethrower on my ass: no car in Syracuse, where the snow’s measurable in yards, and child-care costs that precluded my making much on summer holidays. Maybe my mother and sister were so glib about the book because they were used to my small-press poetry efforts, with

• From The Art of Memoir

  The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self. Pretty much all the great memoirists I’ve met sound on the page like they do in person. If the page is a mask, you rip it off only to find that the writer’s features exactly mold to the mask’s form, with nary a gap between public and private self. These writers’ voices make you feel close to—almost inside—their owners. Who doesn’t halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck Finn or Scout a pal? The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader—from cool and diffident to high-strung and close. The writer doesn’t choose these styles so much as he’s born to them, based on who he is and how he experienced the past. Voice isn’t just a manner of talking. It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past. That’s why self-awareness is so key. The writer who’s lived a fairly unexamined life—someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view—may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say. Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities. Or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations. All those places we misshape the past have to be ’fessed to, and such reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice. You cut a contract early on to offer up the deepest perceptions you can muster without preening and posturing. Other writers may work otherwise, but every great memoirist I ever talked to sounded cursed to face up to real events. That’s just the nature of the

• From My People (2022)

  “That Jacob Zuma, he says he’s going to create jobs. How many times we look for jobs but there’s no jobs?” Jacob Zuma didn’t create the job crisis in Orange Farm, nor is he directly responsible for the uncovered pit latrines. He has been in power for a little over a year, and his term started just six months after the peak of the world financial crisis. But Zuma clearly knows that if he loses the trust of the poor he will lose any chance of governing effectively. And so he has begun a campaign to improve the civil service, which he has denounced as the worst in the world. He told me that he is prepared to get tough on delinquent officials and that he has already started making unannounced visits to check on them. People who ignore his urgings to work harder, he proclaimed, will be fired. He told me about one community where he says that he found the mayor playing hooky. “When I went back for the second time, there was change,” he said. This story scarcely illustrates a national strategy, particularly since the second visit came only after a series of violent protests had shaken the town. All it showed was that the president could pop in on lazy officials and get them to shape up. But Zuma sees it in grander terms. “People were telling me, ‘We now have water. The houses have been built,’ et cetera.” Then, referring to my encounter at Orange Farm, he said, “That’s why those people are right. ‘We want Zuma here.’ “Tomorrow, I’m going to be somewhere.” The lack of a broad strategy has earned the president widespread criticism. When he came into office, he reorganized government departments and gave them sophisticated new names. Foreign Affairs, for example, became International Relations and Cooperation. Analysts complain that he has only created confusion, particularly in financial matters. Azar Jammine, the chief economist at the consulting firm Econometrix, points out that there are now several ministries in charge of economic policy, headed by people with different ideologies. Judith February, an analyst with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, says that Zuma—who declared that 2010 would be a “year of action”—talks a lot and does nothing. “It’s the nature of the presidency that he may be finding his feet, but, at the moment, there is a sense of drift,” she said. Mbeki was criticized for deciding without listening; Zuma is called out for listening but not deciding. Still, Zuma’s position is secure for now. His term runs until 2013, and he does not have an obvious successor within the ANC, a political behemoth so dominant that South Africa is essentially a one-party state. Trevor Manuel, currently the head of the National Planning Commission, may be the most respected government official in the country, but he has a fatal political flaw.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  You could stamp on these shoots of benevolence just as you could cripple or deform yourself physically. On the other hand, if you cultivated them, they would acquire a strength and dynamism of their own. 16 We cannot entirely understand Mencius’s argument without considering the third part of our brain. About twenty thousand years ago, during the Paleolithic Age, human beings evolved a “new brain,” the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers and self-awareness that enable us to stand back from the instinctive, primitive passions. Humans thus became roughly as they are today, subject to the conflicting impulses of their three distinct brains. Paleolithic men were proficient killers. Before the invention of agriculture, they were dependent on the slaughter of animals and used their big brains to develop a technology that enabled them to kill creatures much larger and more powerful than themselves. But their empathy may have made them uneasy. Or so we might conclude from modern hunting societies. Anthropologists observe that tribesmen feel acute anxiety about having to slay the beasts they consider their friends and patrons and try to assuage this distress by ritual purification. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce, bushmen are forced to rely on light weapons that can only graze the skin. So they anoint their arrows with a poison that kills the animal—only very slowly. Out of ineffable solidarity, the hunter stays with his dying victim, crying when it cries, and participating symbolically in its death throes. Other tribes don animal costumes or smear the kill’s blood and excrement on cavern walls, ceremonially returning the creature to the underworld from which it came. 17 Paleolithic hunters may have had a similar understanding. 18 The cave paintings in northern Spain and southwestern France are among the earliest extant documents of our species. These decorated caves almost certainly had a liturgical function, so from the very beginning art and ritual were inseparable. Our neocortex makes us intensely aware of the tragedy and perplexity of our existence, and in art, as in some forms of religious expression, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the softer, limbic emotions to predominate. The frescoes and engravings in the labyrinth of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the earliest of which are seventeen thousand years old, still evoke awe in visitors. In their numinous depiction of the animals, the artists have captured the hunters’ essential ambivalence.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It was not easy to train a warrior to put himself in harm’s way day after day. Ritual gave meaning to an essentially grim and dangerous struggle. The soma dulled inhibitions, and the hymns reminded warriors that by fighting indigenous peoples, they were continuing Indra’s mighty battles for cosmic order. It was said that Vritra had been “the worst of the Vratras,” the native warrior tribes who lurked menacingly on the fringes of Vedic society.7 The Aryans of India shared Zoroaster’s belief that an immense struggle was raging in heaven between the warlike devas and the peace-loving asuras.a But unlike Zoroaster, they rather despised the sedentary asuras and were staunchly on the side of the noble devas, “who drove their chariots, while the asuras stayed at home in their halls.”8 Such was their hatred of the tedium and triviality of settled life that only in their marauding did they feel fully alive. They were, so to speak, spiritually programmed: the constantly repeated ritual gestures imprinted in their bodies and minds an instinctive knowledge of how an alpha male should comport himself; and the emotive hymns implanted a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, an entrenched belief that Aryans were born to dominate.9 All this gave them the courage, tenacity, and energy to traverse the vast distances of northwestern India, eliminating every obstacle in their path.10 We know practically nothing about Aryan life during this period, yet because mythology is not wholly about the heavenly world but essentially about the here and now, in these Vedic texts we catch glimpses of a community fighting for its life. The mythical battles—between devas and asuras and Indra and his cosmic dragons—reflected the wars between Aryans and dasas.11 The Aryans experienced the Punjab as confinement and the dasas as perverse adversaries who were preventing them from attaining the wealth and open spaces that were their due.12 This emotion ran through many of their stories. They imagined Vritra as a huge snake, coiled around the cosmic mountain and squeezing it so tightly that the waters could not escape.13 Another story spoke of the demon Vala, who had incarcerated the sun together with a herd of cows in a cave so that without light, warmth, or food, the world was unviable. But after chanting a hymn beside the sacred fire, Indra had smashed into the mountain, liberated the cows, and set the sun high in the sky.14 The names Vritra and Vala both derived from the Indo-European root *vr, “to obstruct, enclose, encircle,” and one of Indra’s titles was Vrtrahan (“beating the resistance”).15 It was for the Aryans to fight their way through their encircling enemies as Indra had done. Liberation (moksha) would be another symbol that later generations would reinterpret; its opposite was amhas (“captivity”), cognate with the English anxiety and the German Angst, evoking a claustrophobic distress.16 Later sages would conclude that the path to moksha lay in the realization that less is more.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  A little later it occurred to me that our cattle might possibly burn, so I went out and hurried back to the Michigan Street stockyards. An old Irishman was in charge of the yard, but though he knew me perfectly well, he refused to let me take out a steer. The cattle were moving about wildly, evidently in a state of intense excitement. I pleaded with the man and begged him, and at length tied my mare up to the lamp-post at the corner and went back and got into the stockyard when he wasn’t looking. I let down two or three of the bars and the next moment started the cattle through the opening. They went crazy wild and choked the gateway. In five minutes there were ten or twelve dead cattle in the entrance and the rest had to go over them. Suddenly, just as I got through the gap, the mad beasts made a rush and carried away the rails on both sides of the gateway. The next moment I was knocked down and I had just time to drag myself through the fence and so avoid their myriad trampling heels. A few minutes later, I was on Blue Devil, trying to get the cattle out of the town and on to the prairie. The herd broke up at almost every corner but I managed to get about six hundred head right out into the country. I drove them on the dead run for some miles. By this time it was daybreak and at the second or third farmhouse I came to, I found a farmer willing to take in the cattle. I bargained with him a little and at length told him I would give him a dollar a head if he kept them for the week or so we might want to leave them with him. In two minutes he brought out his son and an Irish helper and turned the cattle back and into his pasture. There were six hundred and seventy-six of them, as near as I could count, out of practically two thousand head. By the time I had finished the business and returned to the hotel, it was almost noon and as I could get nothing to eat, I wandered out again to see the progress of the fire. Already I found that relief trains were being sent in with food from all neighboring towns and this was the feature of the next week in starving Chicago.