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 The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that I was or am dismissive or even critical of anything Lou was saying. His vision of sex, of boys, and of poetry, even (as I was to discover) of drugs, was my first and strongest encounter with a pure theory of beauty. I’d always heard sensible down-to-earth values praised, but they were the only kind I’d ever observed, and the repeated endorsements seemed redundant. Now at last I’d met the man everyone had warned me against. I realized he’d never love me. Not that there was anything so wrong with me, but we didn’t form a couple he would have considered sexy. We were companionable, but I was too big and educated to be the boy, and too much younger to be the man. For a week or ten days, Lou tried to turn me into the man, but I was too affectionate in a puppy-dog way. “I’m afraid you just put your dick in me, Bunny, wriggle around and kiss my neck, and shoot like a twelve-year-old,” Lou said, “which is sweet but ineffectual. You need to focus more on cock and ass, pull out farther and plunge deeper, balance your weight on your elbows and toes, that will give you better leverage, go slow. Do everything with deliberation.” I was terribly wounded. Until now I’d never had any anxiety about performance because I hadn’t realized I was on stage. Just as William had made me self-conscious about cock size, Lou made me so nervous about fucking that I kept losing my erection. By default I became the “boy” and occasionally Lou fucked me. Lou was fired from his advertising job, but he told me that happened every six months anyway in the biz. “Every time they lose a big account, they can the whole team. I want to write a book called Love You, Love Your Work, Gonna Hafta Let You Go.” Now that neither of us was working, we were free to go to the Oak Street beach every day or sometimes a mile or two farther north to some slabs of broken concrete, the Belmont Rocks, where the gay boys had staked a claim and which Lou called “Homo-lulu.” Now I knew the whole adolescent world I’d missed out on, the world of idle summer days, of tinny portable radios and coconut oil, of towel hopping and shared Cokes, of desultory exclamations (“Ow! That bug really bit me”) followed by wave-lulled silence and the indignant nursing of the glossy shoulder or silky thigh. Lou wrote a poem about cruising the Oak Street beach at night, but he felt the only good line was “the pollen-streaked lamplight.”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  6 “When you have completed these [days for Israel], lie down again, but on your right side (toward the south), and you shall bear the wickedness and punishment of the b house of Judah forty days. I have assigned you one day for each year. 7 “Then you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem with your arm bared and prophesy against it. 8 “Now behold, I will put ropes on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege. Defiled Bread 9 “But as for you, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, and put them into one vessel and make them into bread for yourself. You shall eat it according to the number of the days that you lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days. 10 “The food you eat each day shall be [measured] by weight, c twenty shekels, to be eaten daily at a set time. 11 “You shall drink water by measure also, d the sixth part of a hin; you shall drink daily at a set time. 12 “You shall eat your food as barley cakes, having baked it in their sight over human dung.” 13 Then the LORD said, “Thus the children of Israel will eat their bread unclean and defiled among the nations where I will banish them.” [Hos 9:3 ] 14 But I said, “Ah, Lord GOD ! Behold (hear me), I have never been defiled; for from my youth until now I have never eaten what died on its own or was torn by beasts, nor has any unclean meat ever entered my mouth.” [Acts 10:14 ] 15 Then He said to me, “See, I will let you use cow’s dung instead of human dung over which you shall prepare your food.” 16 Moreover, He said to me, “Son of man, behold (listen carefully), I am going to break the staff of bread [that supports life] in Jerusalem; and they shall eat bread [rationed] by weight and [eat it] with anxiety and fear, and drink water by measure and [drink it] in horror [of the impending starvation], [Lev 26:26 ; Ps 105:16 ; Is 3:1 ] 17 because bread and water will be scarce; and they will look at one another in dismay and waste away [in punishment] for their wickedness. Ezekiel 5 Jerusalem’s Desolation Foretold 1 “A ND YOU [Ezekiel], son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber’s razor and shave your head and your beard. Then take scales for weighing and divide the hair [into three parts]. 2 “You shall burn one third with fire in the center of the city, when the days of the siege are completed. Then you shall take one third and strike it with the sword all around the city, and one third you shall scatter to the wind; and I will unsheathe a sword behind them.

• From Vox (1992)

  149 Mmmm-forces are flowing from, I park in a place that is sure to get me a ticket, and I leave my flashers on, and I go into the foyer. There's a row of buttons with names beside them: I hold the detector to each one until one, the third one down, makes the Mmmm-Detector glow with strange colors, and I hesitate, I know that I am interrupting you, and I don't want to do that, that's the last thing I want to do, but it seems so clear to me, reading the force waves, that there is a strong possibility that you would want me to interrupt you, if you knew me, and the conviction that this is true grows in me, and my finger trembles at your button, and there is a huge interior war between reticence and attraction, between the fear that I will inspire fear and the certainty that I should not inspire fear and that we would like each other if I could simply push that button, and I look down at the Mmmm-Detector and I see that you are going to come in less than four minutes if you keep on at that rate, you're really moving, the colors are increasingly intense, and I'm trembling, I'm shivering, but I'm compelled, and I push the button, bzzzzt. You're on your bed, and you're wearing a blue long-sleeved pullover sort of shirt, and black pants and black sneakers, but your black pants are around your ankles, and you've got that tattered, disin tegrating issue of Forum in your left hand, and you're reading about a job interview in which the woman in terviewer is sucking the interviewee's cock, and you're right in the middle of things, when bzzzzt, the doorbell. Who could that be?"

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  has been so normatively entrenched in the study of Black women’s lives that there has been very little sustained public dialogue about the lack of traditional heterosexual relationships in the lives of race women like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, or Ella Baker, all of whom were widowed or divorced, and apparently disinterested in remarrying. 61 Acknowledging the complicated and inextricable relationship between race and sexuality is critical to understanding Murray’s conflicts and the ways it informed her public and private personas. Candice Jenkins argues that “in fact the ‘political’ and the ‘intimate’ may be mutually constitutive signs for the Black subject,” so much so, that “it may not be possible, or sensible, to think about racial identity without thinking, simultaneously, of intimate subjectivity for African Americans.” The larger implication is that “the ‘public’ and ‘private’ faces of Blackness cannot and perhaps should not, be distinguished with any great ease.” 62 Murray had become a victim of a racial ideology that Candice Jenkins refers to as the salvific wish, an iteration of the politics of respectability, which is “best defined as the desire to rescue the Black community from racist accusations of sexual and domestic pathology through the embrace of bourgeois propriety.” 63 The salvific wish is a “response to the peculiar vulnerability of the Black subject with regard to intimate conduct,” which leaves “Black bodies, understood as sites of sexual excess ... [as] doubly vulnerable in the intimate arena—to intimacy itself as well as to the violence of social misperceptions surrounding Black intimate character.” 64 Murray’s own stated allegiances to heterosexuality might therefore more appropriately be read in the context of the salvific wish and its beguiling possibilities for combating Black social ills. 65 But if intimacy itself has such potential for violence—here understood as denial and exclusion—then it might be more useful to consider Murray’s struggles with queer identity in terms of the exclusions for various breaches of racial conduct that respectability mandated within Black communities. More specifically, we might read the generalized Black female subject of her 1947 manifesto as a kind of stand-in for Murray’s own struggles with the gender politics of Black communities. This leads to two questions that I want to spend the final section of this chapter answering: What does it mean if “the salvific wish, with its attempts to repress and discipline Black intimate conduct [by] limiting that conduct to patterns of respectability” becomes a site for the repression of Black intimacy and subjectivity? And, more importantly, how do Black female race leaders negotiate these exclusionary and repressive cultural politics? Irreconcilable Differences: Toward Multiracial Peculiarity Bested by the recalcitrance of social discourses on sex and gender, Pauli Murray turned her attention to the question of racial identity. As mentioned earlier, she published Proud Shoes in 1956, the first of two autobiographies.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  The organized anxiety of women placed Black women’s own racial struggles and aspirations at the center of Black public life. These women became not only builders of Black social and brick-and-mortar institutions, but also knowledge creators and shapers of public opinion. Their organized anxiety was rooted in the recognition that Black women’s lived realities are deeply tied to the set of ideas circulating about them in the social world. At the same time, however, Williams’s notion of racial sociality suggests the need for a less superficial form of racial recognition, one less concerned with shifting race public opinion and more concerned with allowing Black women to both see and be seen by each other as subjects worthy of social protections and possibilities. Fannie Barrier Williams and Mary Church Terrell combined intellectual and political resources (and class access) to shape the NACW into a formidable intellectual and political force driving Black politics in the early twentieth century. Mary Church Terrell managed to steer the critical terrain of her life beyond her initial involvement with NACW into a larger and more prominent leadership role that lasted through several decades. In the next chapter, I consider the creative ways that Terrell carried the influence of the NACW School of Thought into a whole new generation of Black politics. CHAPTER 2 “Proper, Dignified Agitation”The Evolution of Mary Church Terrell Because there are blatant, rattle-brained people who tear passion to tatters about wrongs, both real and fancied, in season and out, it is unreasonable to condemn the proper, dignified agitation which is the only way to arouse the conscience of the public against evils and injustice. —Mary Church Terrell, ca. 1913 In early November 1950, the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws (CCEDADL), under the chairship of eighty-seven-year-old Mary Church Terrell, launched an eight-week campaign to stop discrimination at the Kresge’s Five and Dime Store at the corner of 7th Avenue and E Street in the Nation’s Capital.1 Over the course of two months, they picketed and boycotted Kresge’s because store policy would not allow Black patrons to sit down to eat at the store’s lunch counters; instead Black customers were forced to stand and wait in long lines. After forcing the store to change its policy, the Coordinating Committee sent a letter on January 15, 1951, to supporters declaring victory. The Committee asked African Americans to begin patronizing Kresge’s again “so that the victory won will not be lost through lack of exercise of a new-won right.” The letter urged patrons and their friends: “SIT DOWN, DON’T STAND UP!”2 This particular victory fit within an effort begun in 1944 by Howard University students to desegregate the restaurants on U Street that flanked the Howard campus. Terrell lived in the center of the social upheaval on T Street in LeDroit Park, located between U Street and Howard University.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Murray, then in her twenties and thirties, was repeatedly hospitalized with bouts of depression. She wondered about her lifelong struggles with anxiety, which for her seemed connected to a series of romances and romantic attractions to young women.7 The deceptively simple answer would have been for Murray to accept her identity as a lesbian. However, in her questionnaire she indicated that other homosexuals irritated her. She acknowledged a clear attraction to straight, feminine women, but simply could not accept that “homosexuality” was the proper label for her feelings. She insisted and resolved that her ultimate romantic goal was a heterosexual, monogamous partnership.8 Today, we would understand Murray’s rejection of the conflation of her sexual attraction and her gender identity in terms of transgender identity. Because Murray identified as a male, who was attracted to women, she understood herself to be heterosexual, not homosexual. But she was born in a female body, during a time where there was not yet language to articulate the distinctions between sexuality and gender, and to name the possibility of being transgender. Murray’s struggle was made more difficult by her acceptance of deeply entrenched and societally imposed heteronormative assumptions that made it nearly impossible for her to consider expressions of sexuality and gender that we would today call queer or gender nonconforming. Hospitalized again on March 8, 1940, she noted that she had been having severe bouts of emotional crisis since the age of nineteen. They usually emerged, she wrote, after she had fallen in love with a woman without having any acceptable social outlet to express her romantic attractions to women. She lamented that she could not publicly fall in love, or date, or share expressions of affection with members of the same sex.9 Because the explanations doctors offered were unsatisfactory, Murray proposed—in her characteristic take-charge fashion and often to the great aggravation of her doctors—her own set of theories regarding her sexuality. She believed that she would have to turn to experimental treatments rather than to psychiatry for answers to her questions. But even then, she questioned her own investment in a scientific solution, because she considered herself a deeply religious person.10 After concluding that science was still, indeed, her best bet, she asked doctors whether or not she might have intersex characteristics, such as undescended testicles.11 Murray was so convinced of the possibility that she was an intersex person that for the next three years she asked doctors to administer hormone treatments, possibly injections of testosterone, that would allow her to become a normally functioning male. Despite her doctors’ attempts to steer her away from male hormone treatments, she insisted that she would like to experiment with a hormone regimen that could affirm her masculine gender identity.12

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Moreover, her speech, given just as McCarthyism and the Red Scare were set to reach a fevered pitch, connected African American struggles in the U.S. to the struggles of “four-fifths of the world’s population [who] are colored people.”93 “Russia,” she told the audience, “is assiduously cultivating the friendship of colored people all over the world.” Fanning the flames of anticommunist, anti-Russian sentiment and attempting to use that sentiment for her argument, she insinuated that communism would become an increasingly attractive option to “these colored people,” who “are dominated by the great white countries through the medium of Colonialism which the colored people of the world hate and are determined to throw off just as fast as they can.” “And,” she warned with even more foreboding, “I believe they will succeed.”94 These colonized peoples, including Black people in the U.S., whom she implicitly connected to those struggles, were paying close attention to the racial politics of the U.S. The blatant and unrepentant racial discrimination at the hands of a “Law Enforcement Officer of the Capital of the United States” had great symbolic import around the world. “It was hard to understand,” Terrell argued, “how anybody who loves his country can deliberately do something which will cause four-fifths of the world’s population to hate it.”95 Terrell offered a sophisticated analysis of the ways that radical left social movements would come to appeal to people of color in global anticolonial struggles over the next decade. She believed that “making democracy” more inclusive would halt the forward march of communism. She thus attempted to co-opt the rhetoric of the Cold War to advocate for racial freedom in the U.S.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Thus, Laney, Williams, and others imposed a respectability requirement on those women who would become educators of public opinion, in part because the work required an intrinsic placing of the Black female body on display for white public consumption. Certainly, the class policing that anchors respectability discourse remains persistent and troubling; and I suspect it is the reason that many of these women have been given short shrift in existing conversations about Black intellectual thought. Most work has focused on respectability as a marker of problematic class hierarchies among turn-of-the-twentieth-century African Americans. Many middle-class Black women expressed acute anxiety about how the practices of poor Black women would make them look bad. But I want to suggest that we move beyond focusing only on the ways that respectability discourses attempted to instantiate class hierarchies.29 I am not offering social conditions as an apologetic for elite Black women’s problematic class politics. Rather, I argue throughout this book that respectability discourse also constituted one of the earliest theorizations of gender within newly emancipated Black communities. The post-Reconstruction push to style Black people as respectable men and women indexes a community’s attempt to understand and articulate what it meant to be a man or a woman. As Hortense Spillers has suggested, the Middle Passage and chattel slavery stripped all but the most crude gender identifications from the Black body. To the extent, Spillers reminds us, that the “New-world, diasporic plight [of Black people] marked a theft of the body. … [W]e lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”30 “The materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh ‘ungendered’” created an indeterminate social terrain for the articulation of Black gender identity.31 Although I think much of the violation and violence that shaped Black life during enslavement was predicated on a denial of access to gender norms—which is to say that much of the treatment was gender-specific (e.g., denying Black women the protections of womanhood) or, at the very least, specific to the biological sex of the person—Spillers’s larger observation is instructive, namely that enslavement was predicated on a dialectical doing and undoing of gender that frequently rendered the Black body a space of indeterminate gender terrain.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeon-holes were empty and all the drawers were empty; there wasn’t a thing on the desk or in it except a sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a pot-hook. When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to bring the funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably of the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith. A phantom struggle, because they weren’t dreaming of such a thing as the paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We don’t know how to let go. We’re like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box. I think if I had been crazy I couldn’t have hit upon a better scheme to consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the middle of the parlor. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, and which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were trying to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with reality that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had written previously, which were intelligible words, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to me—crude ciphers from the old stone age—because the contact was through the head and the head is a useless appendage unless you’re anchored in mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t inflame the world. I was only a mouth-piece for the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of the life-buoy, was a Herculean task. I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression—I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  It was to this specific moment that Williams referred as “the organized anxiety of women.” As the women met together and shared information about the terribly troubling conditions Black women were facing, an anxiety emerged, borne of a deep and growing consciousness of their “low social condition” and their “desire to initiate the forces of reform.” 24 They were both outraged at and anxious about the public assaults on Black women’s character because they knew that this public discourse of vilification subjected Black women not only to discrimination but also to rape and violence. Thus, they organized themselves to change it, not only by offering social services but also through the mechanism of intellectual activism. Williams’s term organized anxiety roots the intellectual content of racial change within Black women’s bodies, identifying collective racial discontent and collective racial anxiety as forces that propelled institutional and social change through the work of organized Black women. This discussion about the affective nature of the work returns us to Anna Julia Cooper’s ably demonstrated narrative of embodied discourse as a characteristic feature of Black women’s knowledge production. In particular, Williams’s choice to place Black women’s emotions and feelings about the impacts of racism and white supremacy at the fore of her political theorization marks a critical shift from Darlene Clark Hine’s theory of dissemblance, which suggests that Black women never made their private emotions the province of public fodder. Hine writes that Black women as a rule, developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives. The dynamics of dissemblance involved creating the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma. Only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordinary Black women accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle. 25 Moreover, Hine locates the origin for this “cult of secrecy” in the institutional work of the NACW. She argues that “at the core of essentially every activity of the NACW’s individual members was a concern with creating positive images of Black women’s sexuality.” 26 Thus, she concludes that “the culture of dissemblance found its most institutionalized form in the founding” of the NACW. 27 Hine formulates the culture of dissemblance as one of the anchoring political projects of what I understand to be the NACW School of Thought, which disseminated the ideology of dissemblance as a mechanism to help Black women achieve social and political respectability. The problem is that such theorizations overdetermine and oversimplify the complex ways that Black women both theorized and engaged the politics of Black female embodiment.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  That shared sense of care and sympathy for the suffering of Black women that animated the work of the NACW arcs back to the affective term used to frame this chapter: organized anxiety. Williams demonstrated the ways that the work of the NACW helped to inculcate a notion of racial unity through the cultivation of broad racial sympathy and the ways that the NACW helped to codify race public opinion.77 Racial sociality and race public opinion are two critical components in the creation of a Black public sphere. So Williams’s work offers a fundamental insight about the operation of Black public life, namely that Black publics are forged—organized—on anxious terms. Anxiety is used in her work not only in the negative but also in the positive sense; that is, not only in terms of what Black people are anxious about but also what they are anxious for. It is simultaneously an anxiety of adversity and an anxiety of aspiration. There was a collective anxiety of aversion to the oppressive social conditions Black people endured and also a kind of aspirational anxiety to achieve something different. Williams uses anxiety in both senses in “The Club Woman” essay. She registers her aversion to the social repression of Black women in her proclamation about organized anxiety. Later, in celebrating the work of a group of Midwestern clubwomen who had started a kindergarten, she wrote that their success “is a happy justification of the wisdom and anxiety of the colored club woman to extend these schools wherever it is possible to do so.”78 In this latter case, her use of the term anxiety referred to Black women’s aspirations to create better schools for Black children. Certainly, much of the anxiety at the heart of the club movement came from an investment in respectability politics, middle-class aspiration, and the demand that all true race women conform to such dictates. Indeed, racial respectability emerges again and again as a critical pillar of the NACW School of thought. However, racial respectability had both class-based and gender-based investments. Much of the anxiety that race women experienced issued from their concern over the stultifying and damaging definitions of Black women’s sexuality and gender identity. Thus, racial respectability acted not only as a tool of class and gender disciplining (see chapter three) but also as a tool of gender definition and theorization. This fact, together with the other pillars of the NACW school—the combatting of Black women’s civic unknowability and epistemic subjugation, the training of a Black female leadership class, the forging of a new racial sociality that respected the agency of all Black women regardless of class, the reshaping of public opinion through embodied discourse, and the systematic study and dispensation of practical forms of knowledge within local Black communities—militates against an uncritical dismissal of these women on the grounds of elitism.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The good simple man, hearing this, was like to swoon and said, 'How so?' 'O husband mine,' answered Agnesa, 'there took him but now of a sudden a fainting-fit, that methought he was dead, and I knew not what to do or say; but just then Fra Rinaldo our gossip came in and taking him in his arms, said, "Gossip, these be worms he hath in his body, the which draw near to his heart and would infallibly kill him; but have no fear, for I will conjure them and make them all die; and ere I go hence, you shall see the child whole again as ever you saw him." And for that we had need of thee to repeat certain orisons and that the maid could not find thee, he caused his comrade say them in the highest room of our house, whilst he and I came hither and locked ourselves in, so none should hinder us, for that none other than the child's mother might be present at such an office. Indeed, he hath the child yet in his arms and methinketh he waiteth but for his comrade to have made an end of saying the orisons and it will be done, for that the boy is already altogether restored to himself.' The good simple man, believing all this, was so straitened with concern for his child that it never entered his mind to suspect the cheat put upon him by his wife; but, heaving a great sigh, he said, 'I will go see him.' 'Nay,' answered she, 'thou wouldst mar that which hath been done. Wait; I will go see an thou mayst come in and call thee.' Meanwhile, Fra Rinaldo, who had heard everything and had dressed himself at his leisure, took the child in his arms and called out, as soon as he had ordered matters to his mind, saying, 'Harkye, gossip, hear I not my gossip your husband there?' 'Ay, sir,' answered the simpleton; whereupon, 'Then,' said the other, 'come hither.' The cuckold went to him and Fra Rinaldo said to him, 'Take your son by the grace of God whole and well, whereas I deemed but now you would not see him alive at vespers; and look you let make a waxen image of his bigness and set it up, to the praise and glory of God, before the statue of our lord St. Ambrose, through whose intercession He hath vouchsafed to restore him unto you.' The child, seeing his father, ran to him and caressed him, as little children used to do, whilst the latter, taking him, weeping, in his arms, no otherwise than as he had brought him forth of the grave, fell to kissing him and returning thanks to his gossip for that he had made him whole.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  8 “Now, O king, establish the injunction and sign the document so that it may not be changed, in accordance with the law of the Medes and Persians, which [insures that it] may not be altered or revoked.” 9 So King Darius signed the document, that is, the injunction. 10 Now when Daniel knew that the document was signed, he went into his house (now in his roof chamber his windows were open toward Jerusalem); he continued to get down on his knees three times a day, praying and giving thanks before his God, as he had been doing previously. [Ps 5:7 ] 11 Then, by agreement, these men came [together] and found Daniel praying and making requests before his God. 12 Then they approached and spoke before the king regarding his injunction, “Have you not signed an injunction that anyone who petitions (prays to) any god or man except you, O king, within the designated thirty days, is to be thrown into the den of lions?” The king answered, “The statement is true, in accordance with the law of the Medes and Persians, which may not be altered or revoked.” 13 Then they answered and said before the king, “Daniel, who is one of the exiles from Judah, does not pay any attention to you, O king, or to the injunction which you have signed, but keeps praying [to his God] three times a day.” 14 Then, as soon as the king heard these words, he was deeply distressed [over what he had done] and set his mind on rescuing Daniel; and he struggled until the sun went down [trying to work out a way] to save him. 15 Then, by agreement, these same men came to the king and said, “Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and Persians that no injunction or statute which the king establishes may be altered or revoked.” Daniel in the Den of Lions 16 Then the king gave a command, and Daniel was brought and thrown into the den of lions. The king said to Daniel, “May your God, whom you constantly serve, rescue you Himself!” [Ps 34:7 , 19 ; 37:39 , 40 ; 50:15 ] 17 A stone was brought and laid over the mouth of the den; and the king sealed it with his own signet ring and with the signet rings of his nobles, so that nothing would be changed concerning Daniel. 18 Then the king returned to his palace and spent the night fasting; and no music or entertainment was brought before him, and he remained unable to sleep. 19 Then the king arose at dawn, at the break of day, and hurried to the den of lions. 20 When he had come near the den, he called out to Daniel with a troubled voice.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Dan 8:16 ] 22 He instructed me and he talked with me and said, “O Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and wisdom and understanding. 23 “At the beginning of your supplications, the command [to give you an answer] was issued, and I have come to tell you, for you are highly regarded and greatly beloved. Therefore consider the message and begin to understand the [meaning of the] vision. Seventy Weeks and the Messiah 24 “Seventy weeks [of years, or 490 years] e have been decreed for your people and for your holy city (Jerusalem), to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make atonement (reconciliation) for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness (right-standing with God), to seal up vision and prophecy and prophet, and to anoint the Most Holy Place . 25 “So you are to know and understand that from the issuance of the command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until [the coming of] the Messiah (the Anointed One), the Prince, there will be seven weeks [of years] and sixty-two weeks [of years]; it will be built again, with [a city] plaza and moat, even in times of trouble. 26 “Then after the sixty-two weeks [of years] the Anointed One will be cut off [and denied His Messianic kingdom] and have nothing [and no one to defend Him], and the people of the [other] prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined. [Is 53:7–9 ; Nah 1:8 ; Matt 24:6–14 ] 27 “And he will enter into a binding and irrevocable covenant with the many for one week (seven years), but in the middle of the week he will stop the sacrifice and grain offering [for the remaining three and one-half years]; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until the complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who causes the horror.” Daniel 10 Daniel Is Terrified by a Vision 1 I N THE third year of Cyrus king of Persia a message was revealed to Daniel, who was named Belteshazzar; and the message was true and it referred to great conflict (warfare, misery). And he understood the message and had an understanding of the vision. [Dan 8:26 ; Rev 19:9 ] 2 In those days I, Daniel, had been mourning for three entire weeks. 3 I ate no tasty food, nor did any meat or wine enter my mouth; and I did not a anoint (refresh, groom) myself at all for the full three weeks.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Borrowing from Simone de Beauvoir, Butler concludes, then, that “one is not a woman, but rather becomes a woman.” From this, “it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end.” 25 This observation has an important implication for gender, which becomes ultimately a “performance” in the sense that the gendered body “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.” 26 Thus, gender is defined as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” 27 Murray certainly approached gender performatively, considering her description of those actions that marked her as male, including her preference for pants over dresses and her desire to do things that she perceived to be male social amusements. At the same time, Murray’s encounter with law enforcement offers us a picture of what it meant for Black women in the Civil Rights era to be interpellated by the law as women, even when their own sense of gender identity was in conflict with official definitions. In the case of eventual race women activists like Murray, the dictates of respectability politics, coupled with the demands of race leadership, came to constitute the “highly rigid regulatory frame” through which categories of race manhood and race womanhood were produced. To say it differently, respectability politics, which were taken up as a full-scale political program after the end of Reconstruction, not only regulated African American gender performance, but also acted to produce the gender categories themselves, giving political and cultural shape and meaning to what it meant to be a race man or race woman, race boy or race girl. For these racialized categories of gender were still in flux just thirty years after the end of slavery; so the cementation of Jim Crow, and eventually Jane Crow, and the politics of respectability that arose in response, constituted a racialized production of a gender schema, rather than merely regulating existing schemas. By the time Murray began to negotiate these historical notions of racialized gender and black manhood and womanhood, she understood the “regulatory frame” to be “highly rigid.” Murray’s masculine gender performance caused problems for her in both her activism and in her education. In 1938, she attempted to desegregate a University of North Carolina graduate program, ironically the same program in which Garfinkel would become a student. Denied admission because of her race, Murray sought to become one of the NAACP’s test cases under the Plessy segregation statute. Murray pursued admittance to UNC with her characteristic fervor. She wrote letters to the UNC president, the campus newspaper, and other local opponents like James Shepard, president of North Carolina College for Negroes. 28 But her unapologetic boldness was perceived as a dangerous, if naive, brashness by the NAACP’s leadership, especially Roy Wilkins.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  So could lunch, dinner or whatever it was I thought necessary or important. I could almost see the Voice, so close, so impelling, so authoritative it was, and withal bearing such ecumenical import. At times it sounded like a lark, at other times like a nightingale, and sometimes—really eerie, this!—like that bird of Thoreau’s fancy which sings with the same luscious tones night and day. When I began the Interlude called “The Land of Fuck”—meaning “Cockaigne”—I couldn’t believe my ears. “What’s that? ” I cried, never dreaming of what I was being led into. “Don’t ask me to put that down, please. You’re only creating more trouble for me.” But my pleas were ignored. Sentence by sentence I wrote it down, having not the slightest idea what was to come next. Reading copy the following day—it came in installments—I would shake my head and mutter like a lost one. Either it was sheer drivel and hogwash or it was sublime. In any case, I was the one who had to sign his name to it. How could I possibly imagine then that some few years later a judicial triumvirate, eager to prove me a sinner, would accuse me of having written such passages “for gain.” Here I was begging the Muse not to get me into trouble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those “filthy” words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan et alii , I would have to write my books in jail or at the foot of the gallows … and these holy cows deep in clover, failing to recognize dross from gold, render a verdict of guilty, guilty of dreaming it up “to make money”!

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  they might tote a green bookbag or paint on badger eyes or let their bushy, waist-length hair bounce over their shoulders. Sorority girls, unlike Annie, had lots of “personality” of the sort I still see at airports (“You guys! I can’t believe it! This is too incredible!”), a pantomime that can go nowhere beyond being repeated for someone else’s benefit (“Come over here, you won’t believe it, look who’s here, Holly is here, I can’t believe it, Holly in Paris!”). Some were sweet and big-sisterly, good shoulders to cry on; others eternal cheerleaders, all freckles and bobby sox; still others were serious campus leaders with their blond hair in a severe twist. My Annie, although she’d pledged a rather dim sorority that seemed to have nothing but sluts and Home-Ec majors as members, was too moody and far too shy to have much personality. She looked on with confusion, even fear, as other girls kept digging their spurs into their own flanks, neighing louder and louder, pawing the air. She wore that scared smile that the partially deaf produce or that foreigners evince at boisterous parties of people speaking in another language. She didn’t get it. The Beats didn’t make much sense of her either. After all, she wanted to be a “top New York model,” as she said. The Beats were proud to feel they were outsiders against a majority that included nearly everyone else. She was histrionic, but not in the Bronx Ophelia manner of Beat women, who went about scattering black flower petals. Nearly simultaneously, we discovered William Everett Hunton, a first-year law student. I hadn’t slept with Annie. I was (I am) afraid of all women, but especially one so bony, painted, and breakable. Annie pretended to be hurt by my lack of ardor, but only to gain an advantage over me. I suspect she was actually relieved. William was as gay as I but far more eager to try sex with women. I’d conveniently adopted O’Reilly’s theory that homosexuality was only a symptom—a theory, to be sure, that made my urge to love men no more acceptable than Annie’s urge to vomit her supper, but at least the theory didn’t rush me into trying anything so flighty as tinkering with the symptom by literally sleeping with women. I could look forward to years of speculation about Mommy-Daddy; once all my mudpies were neatly stacked, in principle I’d wake one day finding my penis pointing due south, no longer north. “What do you think of him?” Annie asked me. We were walking diagonally across campus. The snow lay in dirty piles all around us as though it represented all the soiled linen we’d ever slept on. “Isn’t he exciting?” “And just a bit phony,” I said. “Does he excite you?” I swallowed. “Yes.” I’d never discussed these things with her before, although O’Reilly had told her of my diagnosis. “He excites me,” Annie declared. “I love his big blue eyes.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  41 Now a man named Jairus, a synagogue official, came [to Him]; and he fell at Jesus’ feet and began begging Him to come to his house; [Matt 9:18–26 ; Mark 5:22–43 ] 42 for he had an only daughter, about twelve years old, and she was dying. But as Jesus went, the people were crowding against Him [almost crushing Him]. 43 And a woman who had [suffered from] a hemorrhage for twelve years e [ and had spent all her money on physicians] , and could not be healed by anyone, 44 came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His outer robe, and immediately her bleeding stopped. 45 Jesus said, “Who touched Me?” While they all were denying it, Peter f [ and those who were with him] said, “Master, the people are crowding and pushing against You!” 46 But Jesus said, “Someone did touch Me, because I was aware that power [to heal] had gone out of Me.” 47 When the woman saw that she had not escaped notice, she came up trembling and fell down before Him. She declared in the presence of all the people the reason why she had touched Him, and how she had been immediately healed. 48 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith [your personal trust and confidence in Me] has made you well. Go in peace (untroubled, undisturbed well-being).” 49 While He was still speaking, someone from the synagogue official’s house came and said [to Jairus], “Your daughter is dead; do not inconvenience the Teacher any further.” 50 But Jesus, hearing this, answered him, “Do not be afraid any longer; only believe and trust [in Me and have faith in My ability to do this], and she will be made well.” 51 When He came to the house, He allowed no one to enter with Him, except Peter and John and James, and the girl’s father and mother. 52 Now they were all weeping loudly and mourning for her; but He said, “Do not weep, for she is not dead, but is sleeping.” 53 Then they began laughing scornfully at Him and ridiculing Him, knowing [without any doubt] that she was dead. 54 But Jesus took hold of her hand and spoke, saying, “Child, arise!” 55 And her spirit returned, and she got up immediately; and He ordered that she be given something to eat. 56 Her parents were greatly astonished [by the miracle]; but He instructed them to tell no one what had happened. Luke 9 Ministry of the Twelve 1 N OW JESUS called together the twelve [disciples] and gave them [the right to exercise] power and authority over all the demons and to heal diseases. 2 Then He sent them out [on a brief journey] to preach a the kingdom of God and to perform healing.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  interact with them in a way that is productive, and also doesn’t leave you suffering from their toxicity. ANGER FACT About a third of people say they have a close friend or family member who has an anger problem. 4 Who This Book is For This book is for anyone navigating the challenges of having an angry person or angry people in their life. This could include working in an environment where you routinely encounter angry people because of the nature of the job. Or it could include having a specific person you regularly interact with who has an anger problem. For instance: Does your romantic partner often lose their temper, snapping at you or others they interact with in a way that makes you uncomfortable? Are you the parent of a child or teen who routinely gets angry? Are you an adult child with a parent or parents who often snap, saying hurtful things or forcing you to walk on eggshells around them? Do you have a boss or co-worker who is quick to snap at you, leaving you feeling anxious at work? Do you have a close friend whose anger has proven to get in the way of your relationship with them? Who This Book is Not For This book is not for people who are in abusive relationships. It is not for people who are being regularly harmed, either physically or emotionally, by an angry person in their life. If you are in an abusive relationship, defined as “a pattern of behavior used by one partner to maintain power and control over another partner

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  reaching out to could value (especially important considering that if they’ve cut off contact, they might not answer the phone if you call). Regardless of how you reach out, let them know how you’re feeling in a direct but non-hostile way, and empower them to take the next step (for instance, “I think you must be angry with me and I would like to talk about it with you. Please let me know when you’re ready.”). TIP Scheduling a time to talk in person or on the phone can be helpful. It provides an opportunity to plan and prepare psychologically for the discussion. If/When They Respond, Be Open to Feedback, and Listen If you do get the opportunity to communicate with them in person or via text/email, make sure to be flexible and open to feedback. Listen to their position with an open mind. As was discussed in chapter 10, it is natural and normal to get defensive in moments like these. You may feel attacked in response to something they say and it’s best to prepare for that possible feeling in advance. Go into the interaction with a plan for what you want to communicate, consistent with what you have already decided is most important, but be prepared for the possibility of things going a different direction than you expected. Solving whatever problem may have led to this situation will necessarily be a joint effort, so you’ll need to be prepared to work together on identifying solutions. Know When to Give Up You may not want to hear this, but there may come a point where you just need to give up. Remember that one of the reasons why they may have cut off contact is because of a genuine desire to end the relationship. If that’s the case, it may be impossible for you to do anything to change their mind. In fact, continuing to try and rebuild the relationship after they have made it clear they don’t want to is