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.

Page 248 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Or not do it—if you follow Hillel,” I quipped, and we were laughing as we left the café and headed home. I hadn’t wanted to pursue the discussion any further. It was too big an idea and still made little sense to me. How could you live your faith unless you were convinced that God existed? How could you live a Christian life if you could not accept the official doctrines about Jesus? And yet I had to accept Hyam’s description of the role of belief in the religious life of Jews. I needed to think about all this by myself, later. Right now I had scripts to write. Joel and his assistant, Danny, were waiting for me outside the immigration hall at Ben Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv. Joel greeted me with the air of hopeless skepticism that I remembered so well from our London meetings, and lumbered ahead of me to the car, pushing my luggage cart. I had to run to keep up with him, and found that I was shivering. I had not expected it to be so cold in the Holy Land and wondered if I had brought enough warm clothes. “It will be colder in Jerusalem,” Joel assured me as he settled heavily in the backseat of the car and lit a cigarette. That was the only remark he addressed to me for the next forty minutes; my nervous attempts to make conversation were ignored and Joel remained silent, apart from barking out an occasional instruction to Danny in Hebrew. Danny was marginally more voluble, asking me about the flight, the weather in London, and if I had bought any duty-free items. After we had exhausted these scintillating topics, we all fell silent. I sat uneasily, wondering how on earth I was going to work with a man who would not even speak to me, but I stared, trying to look nonchalant, out of the window, watching the desolate plain give way to the hills, which seemed menacing in the darkness. Eventually, Joel broke his long silence and called out, “Here it is!” and I could detect the pride that he tried to conceal beneath his gruff delivery. I looked. There beneath us were the lights of a city. So this was Jerusalem, the place that had been the central region of my interior geography ever since I was a small child. I waited to feel something, but the apartment blocks, the supermarkets, and the small news agencies could have belonged to almost any modern city in southern Europe. Joel rapped out another order to Danny, who advanced what seemed to be an objection but was silenced by an explosive imprecation from Joel.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  13Most ethical systems have holes in them, spots where one conundrum or another can slip through. This is all to the good, annoying though it may be in the middle of an argument. A solid ethical system is a dangerous system. Nothing gets sifted without holes. Augustinian Christianity is like this—as a blueprint for living it has no flexibility, no give. Even though this isn’t my blueprint, it concerns me because I live in a society largely, erratically, based on its principles—confused between authoritarianism, Puritanism, and rebellion. Augustinian Christianity, generally known as the Christian Right these days, also concerns me because its believers are concerned with me; part of their interpretation of Christianity is that nothing and no one is outside the purview of Christendom. It is literally prescriptive. If you base the value of other humans on your own absolutes of behavior, then those who behave outside those absolutes sacrifice their humanity. They are (and we’ve heard this word before) beasts. One point of philosophy inherited from both Augustine and Descartes, so often forgotten, is the belief that civilization is a triumph of mind over body—in Jamake Highwater’s words, a place where sexuality is “a moral concept rather than a physical experience.” As a moral concept, sexuality is quantified—its attributes can be counted, defined, boxed, and sold. Everything falls inside or outside the equation. Freud, who was no Augustinian, nevertheless believed that civilization arises in proportion to how much the all-encompassing sexual drive is directed into thought—into work. Both individuals and the culture must sublimate to exist. With sublimation people naturally and necessarily narrow the focus of their sexuality as they leave infancy, repressing the child’s omnivorous and indiscriminate appetite. The pleasure principle gives way to the reality principle, desire is delayed or subverted, gratification transformed, and with that energy redirected, lasting, complex achievements are possible. Sex still exists, but romantic love becomes essential. Sex without love was dangerous in Freud’s view because he thought it naturally selfish. Love creates a protective urge and it creates jealousy, which encourages monogamous, tightly bound relationships. There’s only one small step from here to the belief that real love transcends or eliminates “baser” sexual feelings altogether. Sometimes I wonder how the spiraling traditional theories of sublimation ever come to a stop—if less is better, then none must be best. What if the pleasure principle is allowed to ripen? What if the only absolute is to protect one’s health without harming the health of others? To do so, I think, requires a particular belief that in fact goes against much of the morality we’ve inherited—this requires us to believe in human goodness, and most of us don’t. “All beings are words in the language of God,” wrote William Irwin Thompson. And all of their being is included in that word.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Don’t leave her waiting in the hall.” As he spoke, the bell rang again. “Oh my God,” said Vivaldo, and he stood up, looking very tall and helpless. She put down her drink and went to the door. The girl who faced her was fairly tall, sturdy, very carefully dressed, and somewhat darker than Rufus. She wore a raincoat, with a hood, and carried an umbrella; and beneath the hood, in the shadows of the hall, the dark eyes in the dark face considered Cass intently. There was a hint of Rufus in the eyes—large, intelligent, wary—and in her smile. “Cass Silenski?” Cass put out her hand. “Come in. I do remember you.” She closed the door behind them. “I thought you were one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.” The girl looked at her and Cass realized, for the first time, that a Negro girl could blush. “Oh, come on, now, Mrs. Silenski—” “Give me your things. And please call me Cass.” “Then you call me Ida.” She put the things away. “Shall I make you a drink?” “Yes, I think I need one,” Ida said. “I been scouring this city, I don’t know how long, looking for that no-good brother of mine——” “Vivaldo’s inside,” Cass said, quickly, wishing to say something to prepare the girl but not knowing what to say. “Will you have bourbon or Scotch or rye? and I think we’ve got a little vodka—” “I’ll have bourbon.” She sounded a little breathless; she followed Cass into the kitchen and stood watching her while she made the drink. Cass handed her the glass and looked into Ida’s eyes. “Vivaldo hasn’t seen him since last night,” she said. Ida’s eyes widened, and she thrust out her lower lip, which trembled slightly. Cass touched her elbow. “Come on in. Try not to worry.” They walked into the living room. Vivaldo was standing exactly as she had left him, as though he had not moved at all. Richard rose from the hassock; he had been clipping his nails. “This is my husband, Richard,” Cass said, “and you know Vivaldo.” They shook hands and murmured salutations in a silence that began to stiffen like the beaten white of an egg. They sat down. “Well!” Ida said, shakily, “it’s been a long time.” “Over two years,” Richard said. “Rufus let us see you a couple of times and then he hustled you out of sight somewhere. Very wise of him, too.” Vivaldo said nothing. His eyes, his eyebrows, and his hair looked like so many streaks of charcoal on a dead white surface. “But none of you,” said Ida, “know where my brother is now?” And she looked around the room. “He was with me last night,” Vivaldo said.

• From Another Country (1962)

  So you never thought of me—” “Sexually,” he said. Then he grinned. “Don’t be so sure.” She flushed, at once annoyed and pleased. “I’m not talking about your fantasies.” “I’ve always admired you,” he said soberly, “and envied Richard.” “Well,” she said, “you’d better get over that.” He said nothing. She rattled the ice around in his empty glass. “Well,” he said, “what am I going to do with it? I’m not a monk, I’m tired of running uptown and paying for it——” “For it’s uptown that you run,” she said, with a smile. “What a good American you are.” This angered him. “I haven’t said they were any better than white chicks.” Then he laughed. “Maybe I better cut the damn thing off.” “Don’t be such a baby. Really. You should hear yourself.” “You’re telling me someone’s going to come along who needs it? Needs me?” “I’m not telling you anything,” she said, shortly, “that you don’t already know.” They heard Richard’s study door open. “I’ll fix you another drink; you might as well get good and drunk.” She bumped into Richard in the hall. He was carrying the manuscript. “Do you want a drink now?” “Love one,” he said, and walked into the living room. From the kitchen she heard their voices, a little too loud, a little too friendly. When she came back into the living room, Vivaldo was leafing through the manuscript. Richard stood by the window. “Just read it,” he was saying, “don’t go thinking about Dostoievski and all that. It’s just a book—a pretty good book.” She handed Richard his drink. “It’s a very good book,” she said. She put Vivaldo’s drink on the table beside him. She was surprised and yet not surprised to realize that she was worried about the effect on Richard of Vivaldo’s opinion. “The next book, though, will be better,” Richard said. “And very different.” Vivaldo put the manuscript down and sipped his drink. “Well,” he said, with a grin, “I’ll read it just as soon as I sober up. Whenever,” he added, grimly, “that may be.” “And tell me the truth, you hear? You bastard.” Vivaldo looked at him. “I’ll tell you the truth.” Years ago, Vivaldo had brought his manuscripts to Richard with almost exactly the same words. She moved away from them both and lit a cigarette. Then she heard the elevator door open and close and she looked at the clock. It was four. She looked at Vivaldo. The bell rang. “There she is,” said Cass. She and Vivaldo stared at each other. “Take it easy,” Richard said. “What’re you looking so tragic about?” “Richard,” she said, “that must be Rufus’s sister.” “Well, go let her in.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But Paul could not stop, now that he had begun. “Why would they want to do a thing like that, Daddy? We never even saw them before!” “Sometimes—sometimes the world is like that, Paul. You just have to watch out for people like that.” “Is it because they’re colored and we’re white? Is that why?” Again, Richard and Eric looked at each other. Richard swallowed. “The world is full of all kinds of people, and sometimes they do terrible things to each other, but—that’s not why.” “Some colored people are very nice,” said Eric, “and some are not so nice—like white people. Some are nice and some are terrible.” But he did not sound very convincing and he wished he had held his peace. “This kind of thing’s been happening more and more here lately,” Richard said, “and, frankly, I’m willing to cry Uncle and surrender the island back to the goddam Indians. I don’t think that they ever intended that we should be happy here.” He gave a small, dry laugh, and turned his attention to Paul again. “Would you recognize any of these boys if you saw them again?” “I think so,” Paul said. He caught his breath and dried his eyes. “I know I’d recognize one of them, the one I hit. When the blood came out of his nose and his mouth, it looked so—ugly—against his skin.” Richard watched him a moment. “Let’s go inside and clean up and see what’s happening to old Michael.” “Michael can’t fight,” Paul said, “you know? And kids are always going to be picking on him.” “Well, we’re going to have to do something about that. He’ll have to learn how to fight.” He walked to the door, with his arm on Paul’s shoulder. He turned to Eric. “Make yourself at home, will you? We’ll be back in a few minutes.” And he and Paul left the room. Eric listened to the voices of the children and their parents, racing, indistinct, bewildered. “All kids get into fights,” said Richard, “let’s not make a big thing out of it.” “They didn’t really get into a fight,” Cass said. “They were attacked. That’s not the same thing at all, it seems to me.” “Cass, let’s not make it any worse than it is.” “I still think we ought to call the doctor; we don’t know anything about the human body, how do we know there isn’t something broken or bleeding inside? It happens all the time, people dropping dead two days after an accident.” “Okay, okay, stop being so hysterical. You want to scare them to death?” “I am not hysterical and you stop being the Rock of Gibraltar. I’m not part of your public, I know you!” “Now, what does that mean?” “Nothing.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I also use the Fold when I’m called on to come up with something especially understanding or sympathetic in a conversation and I want to be sure that my tact is exactly on key—although there is a serious risk in mulling over your kindness for any longer than fifteen or twenty seconds, because as you weigh and polish your response you can quickly lose your working sense of the immediate emotional flux. I’ve nearly derailed one or two important heart-to-heart talks by pausing so long to hone my tone that when I was finally ready to re-enter time I knew that I was going to be brittle and foolish and insincere, exactly what I’d Dropped out to avoid, and I had a very hard time working myself back around to the mood that had made the conversation seem important enough for me to have wanted to interrupt it in the first place. Nonetheless, used sparingly, the Fold can really help with commiseration. It is an obvious escape, too—though here again, I have learned to use it sparingly. I was given a temp assignment at the alumni office of a graduate school, where I was asked to roll up posters and stuff them in mailing tubes. I did this for four straight days. I would not have minded if the posters had not been so ugly. On the second day, I found it difficult to entertain the notion of rolling up one more purple-and-black poster—the waste of glossy paper, of post office energy, of university money, seemed too awful—and so I hit the clutch and took two non-hours to read some of Diana Crane’s The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. In that case it helped a lot: the book was better, more licentiously toothsome, for being read en Folde. But there have been other times when, once I have lapsed into the timelessness of the arrested instant, the particular obligation or person from whom I have temporarily freed myself becomes more and more horrific, posed in its or his stalled imminence, and the idea that I will have to take up right where I have left off becomes unbearable, and I re-enter time’s cattle-drive with a sense of defeat and unhappiness more acute than any I felt before I had ducked, or copped, out.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Some boys fretted more over their own bodies’ contours than their partners’, especially (and perhaps not surprisingly) their penis size. That has always been true, to a degree, but porn has exacerbated the issue. “Everyone watches porn and then gets super nervous about their dick size,” confided a college sophomore in Chicago. “I mean, it’s brutal. Like if you’re in the locker room, you’re going to turn around and try to hide yourself, or you’re not going to change in front of other guys.” Some responded by shaving their genital area: as with girls, porn was creating new expectations around hair removal, though for different reasons. Girls generally cited a concern (however inaccurate) about hygiene along with a fear of humiliation by male partners; boys thought it would make their penises look larger. The results weren’t always what they’d hoped. “No one told me that if I did it, I’d look like a baby,” one high school senior said. “I looked down and it was like I hadn’t gone through puberty yet!” A few boys were so concerned about size that they avoided sexual situations. “I had a girlfriend in tenth grade,” Mitchell, in Los Angeles, said, “and as we started being more sexual I became very nervous about the idea of getting erect and about being . . . sufficient. I couldn’t get hard during our first real sexual experience because that was so much on my mind. And once you feel like you can’t get it up, you can’t. You’re done.” For a year, Mitchell declined his girlfriend’s offers to perform oral sex on him, afraid that if she saw his penis, she’d be disappointed. “She was like, ‘What kind of guy wouldn’t want head?’” he recalled. “It was hurtful.” With time, and maybe a little maturity, he got past it. In retrospect, he said, “Comparing myself to porn was obviously ridiculous. But, you know, it’s also kind of understandable.” Like every boy I spoke with, Mitchell claimed to know that, of course, porn wasn’t realistic. But that line between fact and fiction was less clear; after all, porn is depicting something, and what other point of reference do young people have? “If you’re a teenage guy and you don’t have much sexual experience, and you’ve been watching porn or watching HBO at two a.m. for the past six or seven years, you can develop almost a . . . fear, really,” said a college sophomore in North Carolina. “A fear that you would not be able to perform up to those standards, though, of course, no one really can. But maybe the starkest contrast is your perception of the kind of feedback that you’re going to be getting from a girl. Like that they will be moaning and having orgasms all over the place. That’s obviously not the case.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  We used to talk about writing a book together; it was to be titled Proximity. Its ethos would derive from Dialogues II, co-authored by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet: “As we became less sure what came from one, what came from the other, or even from someone else, we would become clearer about ‘What is it to write?’” Eventually, however, I realized that just the idea of such a merging was causing me too much anxiety. I guess I wasn’t ready to lose sight of my own me yet, as for so long, writing has been the only place I have felt it plausible to find it (whatever “it” is). Shame-spot: being someone who spoke freely, copiously, and passionately in high school, then arriving in college and realizing I was in danger of becoming one of those people who makes everyone else roll their eyes: there she goes again. It took some time and trouble, but eventually I learned to stop talking, to be (impersonate, really) an observer. This impersonation led me to write an enormous amount in the margins of my notebooks— marginalia I would later mine to make poems. Forcing myself to shut up, pouring language onto paper instead: this became a habit. But now I’ve returned to copious speaking as well, in the form of teaching. Sometimes, when I’m teaching, when I interject a comment without anyone calling on me, without caring that I just spoke a moment before, or when I interrupt someone to redirect the conversation away from an eddy I personally find fruitless, I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I’m not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep. It’s like she’s pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. I had to agree, this was an apt description of Caws’s style (and hair). But not only did I love this style, I also loved it that no one could tell Caws to teach otherwise. You could abide her or drop her class: the choice was yours. Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like “throwing a pizza at us.” My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws’s hair. Cordelia could not heave her heart into her mouth. Who can? No matter: her refusal to try famously becomes her badge of honor. But her silence has never moved me, quite; instead it’s always struck me as a bit paranoid, sanctimonious—stingy, even.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  My job would be to look after Jacob while Nanny was off duty. That meant that I would take care of him after supper on Wednesday evenings, when Nanny went off to visit a friend, and Jenifer and I would share him on Saturday, which was Nanny’s half day. Jenifer would take him during the afternoon and give him his supper, and then I would take him to my room until it was time for bed. Because of his epilepsy, I would have to sit with him while he went off to sleep, until Jenifer came to bed, at about 10:30 p.m. I was startled to hear that for years she had shared a large attic room at the top of the house with Jacob, who was absolutely terrified of the dark and could not sleep alone because of his night terrors and seizures. Herbert, Jenifer’s husband, slept in his study next to the drawing room, a small, chronically disordered lair that was almost entirely filled with a massive homemade stereo system, constructed out of large wooden crates by Alan Ryan, the Harts’ former son-in-law, who was about to take up a fellowship at New College. Even though he was now divorced from Joanna, I was told that Alan was still very much a part of the family—an idea that I found intriguing. In my Catholic family, divorce was a cataclysm that led to permanent estrangement. “And,” Jenifer continued, “I wonder if you would mind relieving Nanny, who usually sits with him, when I am especially late—out at a dinner or something. Only if you’re free, of course,” she added hastily. “You can read up there. Jacob will go to sleep with the bedside light on, and you can sit on my bed until I come up.” It had sounded quite manageable when Jenifer had run through the job description in her peaceful college rooms. But now that I was about to meet Jacob, I was not so sure. “I hope you’re not worried about all this,” Jenifer said, clearly anxious herself, as she settled opposite me on the white sofa with her own goblet of sherry. “There’s no need to be. In fact, it’s very important that you don’t show any nervousness, because he’ll pick it up in a second, and then it really will be impossible.” I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence, but I was afraid that I might be instinctively repelled by Jacob. Would he look dull and drooling? I had never done anything like this and had no idea how I would cope. How would I occupy a brain-damaged child for hours at a time, week after week? As if reading my thoughts, Jenifer only increased my anxiety as she gave me some last-minute advice.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So I went back to Dr. Piet, telling myself that I couldn’t expect a miracle overnight. What did I know about psychiatry and the mystery of the human mind? If I persevered I might well find that everything suddenly fell into place. But then I would be overtaken by a queasy sense of déjà vu. This was exactly the sort of reasoning that I had used in the convent, and look where it had got me. It was a hot, sticky day in July 1970. The room in the Examination Schools that had been set aside for the viva voce examination seemed to echo to our footsteps as the four of us trooped in and sat in a miserable little huddle against the wall. I looked hopelessly at the members of the board of examiners, who were sitting around three sides of a large table in the big bay window—sixteen dons in full academic dress, gazing at us expressionlessly. Opposite them was a lonely chair for the candidate, and the ten question papers of the final examinations that we had sat some six weeks earlier. I was pleased and relieved to be summoned to a viva. In the English Faculty, only those who were borderline cases between classes, or who were being considered for a first-class degree, had to undergo an oral examination. No viva, therefore no first. For the umpteenth time I mentally reviewed my papers. A viva, I knew, could last for hours. But when I looked again at the examiners, I felt my hopes plummet. I cannot do this, I thought bleakly. All my written answers had been carefully contrived. During the long weeks of revision, I had prepared essays that could be adapted to meet almost any contingency. They were my usual Gothic cathedral creations, intricate edifices of other people’s thoughts. But now I knew that there was no chance that I would be able to think on my feet in the way that would be expected of me. I still sat tongue-tied in class, marveling at the way the others could play confidently with ideas, get fresh insights in the course of a discussion, and produce arguments to support their case at a moment’s notice. I was especially impressed by the ease with which other people could say, “I think.” I had no notion what “I” thought. When I scoured my brain, I still encountered the old blank. There was no way that I could talk freely and impressively to the board. Miserably I listened for my name as the chairman of the examiners read out the list of our names, telling each of us (all of whose names began with the letter A) what time we should present ourselves. He didn’t mention me, and for a moment, compounded of both disappointment and wild relief, I thought it had all been a mistake.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Then: “Do you know where he went? Where’s he staying?” The sounds from the bedroom suggested that Paul and Michael were having a fight. “I don’t know.” I should have asked him, she thought. “Vivaldo would know, they were together, I left them together—look—” Michael screamed and then began to cry, they were going to awaken Richard—“Vivaldo is coming by here this afternoon; why don’t you come, too?” “What time?” “Oh. Three-thirty, four. Do you know where we live?” “Yes. Yes, I’ll be there. Thank you.” “Please don’t be so upset. I’m sure everything will be all right.” “Yes. I’m glad I called you.” “Till later, then.” “Yes. Good-bye.” “Good-bye.” Cass ran into the children’s bedroom and found Paul and Michael rolling furiously about on the floor. Michael was on top. She dragged him to his feet. Paul rose slowly, looking defiant and ashamed. He was eleven, after all, and Michael was only eight. “What’s all this noise about?” “He was trying to take my chess set,” Michael said. The box, the board, and broken chessmen were scattered on both beds and all over the room. “I was not,” Paul said, and looked at his mother. “I was only trying to teach him how to play.” “You don’t know how to play,” said Michael; now that his mother was in the room, he sniffed loudly once or twice and began collecting his property. Paul did know how to play—or knew, anyway, that chess was a game with rules that had to be learned. He played with his father from time to time. But he also loved to torment his brother, who preferred to make up stories about his various chessmen as he moved them about. For this, of course, he did not need a partner. Watching Michael manipulate Richard’s old, broken chess set always made Paul very indignant. “Never mind that,” Cass said, “you know that’s Michael’s chess set and he can do whatever he wants with it. Now, come on, wash up, and get your clothes on.” She went into the bathroom to supervise their washing and get them dressed. “Is Daddy up yet?” Paul wanted to know. “No. He’s sleeping. He’s tired.” “Can’t I go in and wake him?” “No. Not this morning. Stand still.” “What about his breakfast?” Michael asked. “He’ll have his breakfast when he gets up,” she said. “We never have breakfast together any more,” said Paul. “Why can’t I go and wake him?” “Because I told you not to,” she said. They walked into the kitchen. “We can have breakfast together now, but your father needs his sleep.” “He’s always sleeping,” said Paul. “You were out real late last night,” said Michael, shyly. She was a fairly impartial mother, or tried to be; but sometimes Michael’s shy, grave charm moved her as Paul’s more direct, more calculating presence seldom could. “What do you care?” she said, and ruffled his reddish blond hair. “And, anyway, how do you know?”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  [image file=image_rsrc1FT.jpg] SIXTEEN [image file=image_rsrc1FU.jpg] Emergent Sex and Non-emergent TechnologyNot all virtual environments take the approach of Second Life, which is to rely on emergent sex as an engine of change and creativity. Some virtual sex comes from games’ creators rather than the users. Given how ubiquitous sex is in general-interest games, pornographic games intuitively strike one as a natural business opportunity. In reality, though, adult video games are the domain of a very few companies and individuals who are able to invest in an area where the track record is one of limited success (and some spectacular failures). Video games earned a reputation as entertainment for kids and teenagers. Some people suggest that this association explains why an adult video game industry hasn’t sprung up on the same scale as pornographic movies. This can’t be the whole story, though. After all, other so-called kids’ mediums had X-rated counterparts. Superhero comic books, for example, existed alongside “Tijuana Bibles”—illicitly sold pornographic comics, often featuring unauthorized depictions of celebrities. Two other factors limit the number of video games made expressly for pornography. First, making a video game is not like making a movie. One guy with a camera can shoot a scene for a porn flick, but a video game demands time and expertise that is not nearly so cheap or common. Producing even a simple game—even one as simple-minded as Custer’s Revenge— requires a major investment. No one can churn out thirteen thousand video games every year the way “the other Hollywood” does with porn movies. The second limitation brings us right back to the power of the word “you.” The effect of being immersed in a video game is qualitatively different from any medium in which the consumer is just a spectator. You don’t feel as though you’re pushing a button on a controller—you feel like you’re blowing up a tank. Translate that into sexuality, particularly acting out sexual fantasies, and you are playing with a power that few companies have been willing or able to harness. Although the explicitly erotic video game sector remains relatively small, it is still a driving force in the field. One of the few success stories in the adult video game genre is Virtually Jenna. Developed by Thrixxx Technologies (slogan “Simulates what stimulates”), whose Vancouver-based operation is run by Brad Abrams, this game has the advantage of trading on one of the most famous names in pornography, Jenna Jameson. As the eponymous title suggests, the game involves a computer-generated version of Jameson, along with those of many of her “friends.” Essentially, the game allows the user to be a porn-film director, setting up virtual scenarios and then playing them out. There are many options for different positions, toys, numbers of partners and so on. “The challenge,” Abrams said, “is that people’s imaginations are so extensive that in our role-playing games, even when you do all the animations, create all the scenarios, create content, outfits, you can’t match everybody’s fantasy.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The doctor dismissed these worries as excessive but agreed that I was not very well. He talked sagely about anxiety attacks, told me that these things happened, were fairly common, and could easily be dealt with. After all, I had been under a strain; I was probably working too hard. In my final year now, was I? Exams next summer? Yes, people often got het up about these things. But in view of my . . . er . . . history, it might be a good idea to go and see a specialist. He knew a very good chap at the Littlemore Hospital. Somebody would write to me in due course to set up an appointment. Good idea to talk things over, perhaps take some medication—only temporarily, of course—to get rid of these bouts of panic, and then I’d soon be on my feet. The Littlemore. One of Oxford’s two psychiatric hospitals. My heart sank. I had seen it coming, but now that the process had been set in motion, it felt like a real defeat. Psychiatry had certainly not been part of the convent ethos. The very idea of “talking things over” with anyone was anathema. But I could see no alternative. The way both the doctor and the college nurse had taken refuge immediately in cliché when confronted with my predicament indicated that they felt out of their depth. I needed expert help, but I still shrank from exposing the mess of my life to a stranger, who would examine it clinically and make his own appraisal, and I hated the prospect of being known to be mentally ill. It was partly to prevent this, I suppose, that I started to become more reclusive and reserved. I was afraid of experiencing one of these uncanny episodes when I was with other people. I had lost confidence. Where previously I had felt only shy and socially inhibited, I could now place no trust in either my body or my mind. I no longer took it for granted that I could get through a party or a quiet evening with friends without succumbing to this malady, and indeed, I had noticed that the flickering lighting to which people seemed so strangely addicted these days made me feel very odd indeed. And so, just as I had started to put out feelers to the world, I began to withdraw again.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  A few months after Florida: you always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort in your skin; me vaulting fast into the unfuckable, not wanting to dislodge the hard-won baby seed, falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head—falling forever—all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated. … Our bodies grew stranger, to ourselves, to each other. You sprouted coarse hair in new places; new muscles fanned out across your hip bones. My breasts were sore for over a year, and while they don't hurt anymore, they still feel like they belong to someone else (and in a sense, since I'm still nursing, they do). … Via pregnancy, I have my first sustained encounter with the pendulous, the slow, the exhausted, the disabled. I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now—two years out—my insides feel more quivery than lush. … Can fragility feel as hot as bravado? I think so, but sometimes struggle to find the way.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She put the things away. “Shall I make you a drink?” “Yes, I think I need one,” Ida said. “I been scouring this city, I don’t know how long, looking for that no-good brother of mine——” “Vivaldo’s inside,” Cass said, quickly, wishing to say something to prepare the girl but not knowing what to say. “Will you have bourbon or Scotch or rye? and I think we’ve got a little vodka—” “I’ll have bourbon.” She sounded a little breathless; she followed Cass into the kitchen and stood watching her while she made the drink. Cass handed her the glass and looked into Ida’s eyes. “Vivaldo hasn’t seen him since last night,” she said. Ida’s eyes widened, and she thrust out her lower lip, which trembled slightly. Cass touched her elbow. “Come on in. Try not to worry.” They walked into the living room. Vivaldo was standing exactly as she had left him, as though he had not moved at all. Richard rose from the hassock; he had been clipping his nails. “This is my husband, Richard,” Cass said, “and you know Vivaldo.” They shook hands and murmured salutations in a silence that began to stiffen like the beaten white of an egg. They sat down. “Well!” Ida said, shakily, “it’s been a long time.” “Over two years,” Richard said. “Rufus let us see you a couple of times and then he hustled you out of sight somewhere. Very wise of him, too.” Vivaldo said nothing. His eyes, his eyebrows, and his hair looked like so many streaks of charcoal on a dead white surface. “But none of you,” said Ida, “know where my brother is now?” And she looked around the room. “He was with me last night,” Vivaldo said. His voice was too low; Ida strained forward to hear. He cleared his throat. “We all saw him,” Richard said, “he was fine.” “He was supposed to stay at my place,” said Vivaldo, “but we—I—got talking to somebody—and then, when I looked up, he was gone.” He seemed to feel that this was not the best way to put it. “There were lots of his friends around; I figured he had a drink with some of them and then maybe went off and decided to stay the night.” “Do you know these friends?” Ida asked. “Well, I know them when I see them. I don’t know—all their names .” The silence stretched. Vivaldo dropped his eyes. “Did he have any money? ” “Well”—he looked to Richard and Cass—“I don’t know .” “How did he look?” They stared at each other. “All right. Tired, maybe.” “I’ll bet.” She sipped her drink; her hand shook a little. “I don’t want to make a big fuss over nothing. I’m sure he’s all right, wherever he is. I’d just like to know .

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The merging of two into one in orgasm, this blending of identity, combines bliss and anxiety in a strange stew. This may be the best explanation for why the orgasms of masturbation can be more powerful and feel more physically whole than those shared. They are simply safer. Murray Davis uses the phrase “fear of ontological contamination” to describe how we can hold our inner self in check even when our body is fully engaged. But one of the great utilities of sex is to overcome this—to create a place of ontological surrender. The release is separate from the simply physical gratification and yet it is felt physically and has physical effects. It is possible during sex—and not just in orgasm—to get out of one’s head in a quite literal way. You lose you for a while, and watch yourself go, and this as much as anything creates the almost total state of repose that follows. To lose oneself awhile can be such a relief. The odd thing about the human ego is how it both resists and longs for its own extinction; the ego is what gets us into bed in the first place, as much as our body; the ego is the selfish part of us that demands the pleasure of orgasm, that focuses self-centeredly on the body of another as a source of private pleasure, and it’s the ego that, ultimately, is killed by the result. Orgasm is a version of the ego’s death wish; it is the little death, a miniature reminder of the bigger one. Orgasm is an incandescent and inarticulate memory of the universe before birth. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead rebirth is felt initially as the sexual urge for one’s mother’s womb. Fear of sexual intimacy is distinctly related to the fear of death; the journey in and out of the body is like a journey into another world. (The joke goes like this: When does the atheist pray to God?) The cries of orgasm are curses as well as prayers—we call on God and Jesus and for all I know, Allah and Mohammed and Moses as well, and we say Yes, and we say No. Another joke: Don’t, stop, don’t, stop, don’t stop.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Perhaps due to my own issues with reproductive futurism, I’ve always been a little spooked by texts addressed to or dedicated to babies, be they unborn or infant. Such gestures are undoubtedly born from love, I know. But the illiteracy of the addressee—not to mention the temporal gap between the moment of the address and that at which the child will have grown into enough of an adult to receive it (presuming one ever becomes an adult, in relation to one’s parents)—underscores the discomfiting fact that relation can never be achieved in a simple fashion through writing, if it can be achieved at all. It frightens me to involve a tiny human being in this difficulty, this misfiring, from the start. And yet certain instances have undeniably moved me, such as André Breton’s letter to his infant daughter in Mad Love. Breton’s hetero romanticism is, as always, hard to take. But I like the sweet assurance he offers his daughter, that she was “thought of as possible, as certain, in the very moment when, in a love deeply sure of itself, a man and a woman wanted you to be.” Insemination after insemination, wanting our baby to be. Climbing up on the cold exam table, abiding the sting of the catheter threaded through the opal slit of my cervix, feeling the familiar cramp of rinsed, thawed seminal fluid pooling directly into my uterus. You holding my hand month after month, in devotion, in perseverance. They’re probably shooting egg whites, I said, tears sprouting. Shhh, you whispered. Shhh. The first few times we did the procedure, I brought a satchel of good luck charms. Sometimes, after the nurse dimmed the lights and left the room, you would hold me as I made myself come. The point wasn’t romance as much as it was to suck the specimen upward (even though we knew it was already about as far up as it could go). As the months went by, however, I started leaving the charms at home. Eventually I felt lucky if I made it to the class I was teaching with the right book in my hand, so scrambled had I become by all the early-morning temperature taking, impossible-to-read ovulation predictor kits, the tortuous examination of every “spin-like” excretion that exited my body, the sharp despair wrought by the first smudge of menstrual blood. Frustrated with our costly, ineffective approach, we off-roaded for a few months with a noble friend who generously agreed to be our donor, trading the cold metal table for the comfort of our bed, and pricey vials for our friend’s free specimen, which he would leave in our bathroom in a squat glass jar that used to hold Paul Newman salsa.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Plenty of Christians, alas, have imagined that a “divine Jesus” had come to earth simply to reveal his divinity and save people away from earth for a distant “heaven.” (Some have even imagined, absurdly, that the point of “proving that Jesus really did all those things” is to show that the Bible is true—as though Jesus came to witness to the Bible rather than the other way around.) It has been all too possible to use the doctrine of the incarnation or even the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture as a way of protecting oneself and one’s worldview and political agenda against having to face the far greater challenge of God taking charge, of God becoming king, on earth as in heaven. But that is what the stories in the Bible are all about. That’s what the story of Jesus was, and is, all about. That is the real challenge, and skeptics aren’t the only ones who find clever ways to avoid it. Once we begin to see beyond these three distracting angles of vision, then, and grasp the story in its own terms, we find ourselves compelled forward into the narrative again. If the time is fulfilled, what will happen to bring even this fulfilled-time moment to its proper conclusion? If Jesus is behaving as though he were the Temple in person, what will this mean both for the existing Temple and for his followers? And if, through his work, new creation is breaking into the world, how is it going to make any headway against the apparently still all-powerful forces of corruption, evil, and death itself? 8 From V. Sander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, trans. Sr. Gabriel Anne (London: SPCK, 1975), pp. 15–16, as quoted in Roger Pooley and Philip Seddon, The Lord of the Journey (London: Collins, 1986), p. 51.Chapter 12 At the Heart of the Storm WITH ALL OF THIS now on the table, we return to the perfect storm: to the buildup of pressure from the Roman Empire in one direction, the thousand-year hope of Israel from another direction, and the cyclone itself, the strange and powerful purposes of God, sweeping in from yet a third angle. The gale of imperial pressure was bearing down on the Middle East. Some Jews, long before, had seen the Romans as potential allies against more immediate and localized enemies, but most now recognized Rome as the latest and perhaps the nastiest in a long sequence of pagan overlords stretching back half a millennium to Babylon and, a millennium before that again, to Egypt. But that recognition simply increased the high-pressure system of Jewish hopes, since the great Exodus story, celebrated time and time again, reminded Israel that when the tyrants did their worst, God would win the victory, liberate his people, and come to live among them once more.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.” I have deliberately set out these passages at some length to show just how strong, just how deep-rooted in scripture, is the idea of YHWH himself coming to rule and reign as Israel’s king. Several of the themes one can observe in the sorry sequence of would-be kings from the Maccabees to bar-Kochba (see Chapter 9) emerge in a clear light: victory over the nations, the rescue of Israel from oppression, Jerusalem and the Temple as the proper dwelling place for God’s glory, and so on. But it is YHWH himself who will bring this about—or, in that final twist in Ezekiel 34, echoed in Psalm 2, YHWH himself acting in and through the Davidic king. The idea of YHWH alone as king, as expressed by the extreme revolutionaries in the first century, thus raises a big question. What will this mean in practice, in reality? What will it look like? How does all this line up, if it does, with the national expectation and hope? Will it underwrite it, will it overthrow it, or will it perhaps do both of those at the same time? Paying attention to the prophets would indicate that something like this third possibility was likely; but what would it actually mean? In particular, the question was raised: would YHWH actually appear, visibly and in person, to take charge? If so, what could people expect to see? How would it happen? Or, if not, would he act through chosen representatives—perhaps specially inspired prophets? (There was no shortage of people in the first century claiming prophetic inspiration, speaking urgent words from YHWH to his suffering and anxious people, sometimes promising them immediate and spectacular supernatural deliverance.) And if YHWH did choose to act in that way—acting in one sense all by himself, but in another through particular representatives—how would those people be equipped for the task? This, again, is where the ancient idea of “anointing” comes into play. An individual is solemnly smeared with holy oil as a sign, and perhaps a means, of a special “equipping,” or “enabling,” from YHWH himself to perform the necessary tasks. Such persons are no longer acting on their own authority or initiative, but on God’s. A dangerous claim, and one can imagine people being instantly cynical: “Claiming to speak for YHWH? What, another one? We’ve heard that before. You’re probably just a fraud like all the others.” There was, after all, no obvious model for what it might look like, how it might happen, that YHWH would do what all those psalms and prophets said and come in person to take charge, ruling the world, rescuing Israel, establishing his presence in the Temple, judging the nations, and causing the trees and the animals to shout for joy. The ancient scriptures are quite unhelpful on the matter.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “You’ll have to find your own way,” she explained. “Find your own special thing to do with him. He tends to put us all into watertight compartments, and won’t let anyone ever encroach on somebody else’s territory. I believe this kind of ritual behavior is quite common with autistic children. Nanny is the only one who is allowed to read to him; he and I play backgammon—or try to.” She gave a short bark of a laugh. “He usually loses his temper. And he’ll help me in the garden or we’ll go for a walk. Just now, he’s out with my husband, who takes him for long drives. Though that’s not ideal really,” she added. “Herbert is not the world’s best driver. Anyway”—she brightened—“I’m sure you’ll find something. It’s really not difficult—not as hard as it sounds. He’s basically very open and loving. He generally adores grown-ups. He’ll be very eager to be your friend.” I hoped so. “What about other children?” I asked. “Does he have friends at school, for instance?” Jenifer shook her head. “No. Children worry him. Jacob is very tall for his age, you see, and he gets alarmed when little people scurry about. They’re too noisy. And I suppose they’re a bit frightened of him, and he senses that.” She stretched out her thin, brown legs and contemplated her feet, clad in clumsy men’s sandals. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never sent him away. To a home or hospital.” She frowned, and her tone darkened. “Lots of people said that we should do that, but it’s ludicrous!” She seemed to be rehearsing an argument that she had had many times before. “We manage very well. With Nanny—and now that you’re coming it will be even better. We can’t just send him away. That seems terribly irresponsible. And in his own way, he’s happy here—as happy as he can be. He adores Nanny and he has lots of special adult friends. We’ve got a house in Cornwall, where we spend the Easter and summer vacs, and that’s marvelous for him. It’s a huge house, right on a cliff, and he feels free there. You must come down. We have interesting people to stay.” A key rattled in the front door and I looked up apprehensively. “He’ll be very shy at first,” Jenifer warned me. “He might even throw a tantrum. Just take no notice.” I swallowed hard and assumed what I hoped was a nonchalant expression. “Mummy!” There was a peremptory cry from the hall, a jumble of footsteps, and then Jacob exploded into the room. I was quite unprepared for him, and the artificial smile I had carefully put on turned involuntarily to one of genuine pleasure. Jacob was beautiful. Tall and slim, his skin delicately tanned, an elegantly structured face, and tousled blond curls. But also formidable: he slammed the door and looked warily around him. “Who is that?” He spoke quietly, separating each word with care.