Awe

Passages

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

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• From Bestiary (2020)

  And, of course, by now you know how my mother was born*20: Our grandfather ate the crab, steamed with green onions and glittered in oil, and spat a pink mouthful across the table. That wet fist of meat began to mewl and writhe, as if something was tented inside, beating a way out. A fetus: fully formed and orange as the crab’s shell. The crab was no god or ghost or demon. It was his daughter, born from a half-cooked man and a pirate, with a name no one could pronounce. The child spoke it herself, a sound halfway between swallow and song. Be careful what you ejaculate into the sea. A crab could crawl onto your ship and grow your child inside it.*21 My grandfather, having successfully sired children with his wife and a pirate, retired back to his fishing boat. My grandmother didn’t mind having one less person to feed, so he spent the rest of his life scouring the sea, holding the fishing pole between his knees as he doodled maps with both his hands. They were nonsensical maps, maps that were all ocean or all land, that had rivers ending in volcanoes or mountains that punctured the sky and let out all its color. They were maps with no directions, no orientation, no decipherable key. Sometimes the maps were just arterial collections of lines, rivers balled up like thread, roads without beginning or end. They were maps to get lost with, and when passing boats advised him to turn back, head toward safer waters—when dockhands tried to sell him real maps with real trade routes and real countries—he refused. He was trying to be lost, and he was professionally good at it. As long as he was lost, my grandfather believed that Ah Zheng would have to find him, recapture him from home, place him in the bondage of belonging again with someone. I choose to believe that Ah Zheng found my grandfather again, delirious with thirst and far from any coast; I still dream about it; I still see him in a fishing boat, small as a hat; then he’s suddenly overshadowed by a frigate; Ah Zheng on the deck, waving his shirt like a flag, bare-skinned and salt-striped; the logo of Ah Zheng’s new pirate fleet painted in his own blood; a scab-colored crab with a hundred legs; a hundred-legged crab with wings; Ah Zheng scolding Old Guang for leaving their daughter on land, letting her be corrupted by land-hemmed people; but at least there is time enough for a million more children, a million-gendered child; between them, there is an entire century to father; an entire sea to sire.*22

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The “test” implied in this vision is not only about the Messiah’s right relationship with God (and, therefore, humanity’s relationship to God), but also on the other end of the alignment, about the relationship to Mother Earth. Any human ego is capable of imagining “the sky is the limit.” We can be tempted to imagine that everything out there is up for grabs. We can become covetous, greedy, desiring to possess whatever we see. Sitting on a small patch of real estate, we may begin to think that there should be more. In fact, that we deserve more. The open sky, the endless expanse of creation, becomes not an object of wonder, but an object of plunder. One of the most bizarre things about European colonizers from the Native American perspective was their insane idea that they could “own the earth.” Traditional Native American societies do not have a concept of land ownership. The land is granted by God to the People in sacred trust as part of the Native Covenant. It is, and remains, the creation of God. Human beings are the stewards of the land, caretakers only and not owners. They are responsible for maintaining it, sharing it, and enjoying it. Therefore, looking out to the world, they see a garden of blessing. European colonists saw profit. They saw an endless resource that could be conquered, claimed, owned, used. The spiritual vision of the invaders was both incredibly narrow (every little piece of property had to belong to them) and incredibly broad (they never stopped wanting more). The vision of the sky illustrates this fundamental temptation for the Native Messiah. Is the right relationship to all that there is a question of stewardship or of ownership? Which will it be? The profession of faith by the Native Messiah sends a resounding answer in affirmation of the Native Covenant. The Earth is a living being. She is personified in female imagery to underscore her role as the source of life. Earth, therefore, is Mother because the vast network of life, the systems of life, of which human beings are only a small part, is sacred. God designs them for a divine purpose. They maintain the universal balance of relationships ordained by God from the beginning of creation. For human beings to break that chain of kinship (for us to throw ourselves down to test it) would be a spiritual disaster. We are not to insult God by claiming that we can use the creation for our own purposes, much less for profit. We are not the masters of all we see. We cannot swallow the universe into the stomach of our own greed. We do not need more. The ethic implicit in a culture that understands family as a vast matrix of kinship is an ethic of sharing. The sky vision shows Jesus the fundamental value of Native life: it is to be lived in a spirit of stewardship. Human beings are entrusted with everything they see.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Then each would lie down beneath the tree as though he were dead, and the holy men would cut a place in his back or chest, so that a strip of rawhide, fastened to the top of the tree, could be pushed through the flesh and tied. Then the men would get up and dance to the drum, leaning on the rawhide strip as long as he could stand the pain or until the flesh tore loose. 1 The tree Black Elk refers to is a small tree that was secured in the center of the dance ground circle, one that had been ceremonially chosen with great care and reverence. As in many other world religions, this symbol of the tree represented the axis mundi, the tree of life that is the link between earth and heaven. Of course, the aspect of the Sun Dance that caused Europeans such concern was not the tree, but the blood and pain endured by the dancers. This is the part of the dance that is at the heart of the controversy. What were these men who allowed themselves to be pierced and tied to a tree doing? What was their motivation and what was the meaning behind the dance? The answer from the Native Covenant can be given in a single word: sacrifice. Men who participate in the Sun Dance do so because they have received a vision. They believe they have been given an opportunity to make a sacrifice of their own bodies, accepting the pain of piercing and torn flesh, in order to offer a blessing to their people. Their motivation is, therefore, a selfless act. They volunteer to dance out of an abiding love for their community. In the theology of the Sun Dance this noble gesture of love releases the power of healing into the whole nation. It allows the people to live and to prosper. It is an extreme form of the Good Medicine that sustains the traditional Native community. The Europeans who banned the Sun Dance did not grasp the subtleties of this theology. They saw only the blood and the suffering of the dancers. They assumed it was a style of human sacrifice just short of ritual murder, but still a maiming of the body. Their anxious imaginations equated the Sun Dance with a ceremony of blood lust, something that would whip the hostiles into a frenzy, so they forbade it to be performed. From their viewpoint they had suppressed a primitive ritual designed to incite Native Americans to seek more blood. From the Native American viewpoint they had denied the whole nation the healing offered by a handful of faithful men who were responding to a call from God. The suppression of the Sun Dance is important for us to consider because it so graphically illustrates the power of sacrifice in human society.2 Sacrifice can be a fearful thing or a noble thing, depending on the spiritual vantage point of the culture observing it.

• From The Art of Memoir

  portends a whole slew of other meanings—ideological, moral, spiritual—that weave into the book’s leitmotifs. So the objects he dwells on aren’t just pretty gewgaws from antique parlors; he infuses them with emotional consequence and symbolic weight and philosophical resonance. Early on, he starts training you to read into things like a necromancer deciphering the stars. He’s a kid in a cot making a tent of his bedclothes, “shadowy snowslides of linen,” and that crib exists for me as though I’d wallowed in it. And it’s his mother’s jewels he played with in the crib —rings and tiaras and so forth: [A] certain beautiful, delightfully solid garnet-dark crystal egg left over from some forgotten Easter; I used to chew a corner of the bedsheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrap the egg in it so tightly, so as to admire and re-lick the warm, ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color. A lesser writer might sound florid detailing an object’s jewel-like hue with phrases like “miraculous completeness.” But in Nabokov’s case, his dramatic devouring of the egg enacts his actual physical passion for splendor while granting the object psychological power. He calls sucking on it “not yet the closest I got to feeding on beauty.” So that egg is stone-cold food, only nurturing to the poetic mind, which is the altar at which Nabokov worships. The fake egg is maternal and primordial, and it holds in its ruby light birth’s promise —and he, the artist-to-be, is nursing on it. This is baby Nabokov, the nascent connoisseur coming to consciousness before his mysterious, radiant god—timeless beauty. That stone garnet egg is cold and indestructible, but somehow mother’s milk for him. This description comes early enough to help establish in a reader’s mind the poetic resonance of objects as part of the book’s inner struggle. Siphoning up beauty isn’t only a leitmotif; it’s a form of survival.

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

  Its victorious ruler would become the first emperor of China. We find in this period of Chinese history a fascinating pattern that shows how mistaken it is to imagine that a given set of “religious” beliefs and practices will lead inexorably to violence. Instead, we find people drawing on the same pool of mythology, contemplative disciplines, and ideas but embarking on radically different courses of action. Even though the Warring States were moving toward an ethos that approached modern secularism, their hardheaded strategists regarded themselves as sages and saw their warfare as a species of religion. Their hero was the Yellow Emperor and these commanders were convinced that, like his textbook of military strategy, their own treatises were divinely revealed. The sage kings had discovered an orderly design in the cosmos that showed them how to organize society; similarly the military commander could discern a pattern in the chaos of the battlefield that enabled him to find the most efficient way to achieve victory. “The one with many strategic factors in his favor wins, the one with few strategic factors in his favor loses,” explained Sunzi, a contemporary of Mencius. “Observing the matter in this way, I can see who will win and who will lose.” 85 A good commander could even defeat the enemy without any fighting at all. If the odds were stacked against him, the best policy was to wait until the enemy, believing that you were weak, became overconfident and made a fatal mistake. The commander should regard his troops as mere extensions of his will and control them as the mind directs the body. Even though he was of noble birth, an able commander would live among his peasant soldiers, sharing their hardships and becoming the model to which they must conform. He would inflict terrible punishments on his men to make them fear him more than death on the battlefield; indeed, a good strategist would deliberately put his troops into such danger that they had no option but to fight their way out. A soldier could have no mind of his own but should be as subservient and passive in relation to his commander as a woman. Warfare had been “feminized.” Indeed, feminine weakness could be more effective than masculine belligerence: the best armies might seem to be as weak as water—but water could be extremely destructive. 86 “The military is a Way [dao] of Deception,” said Sunzi. The name of the game was to deceive the enemy: Thus when able, manifest inability. When active, manifest inactivity. When near, manifest as far. When far, manifest as near. When he seeks advantage, lure him. When he is in chaos, take him. When he is substantial, prepare against him. When he is strong, avoid him. Attack where he is unprepared.

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

  Francis began to question the men about the movement of various animals, and I drifted away from the fire to glance up at the stars. It had been years since I’d seen them like this; away from the lights of the city, they were thick and round and bright as jewels. I noticed a patch of haze in the otherwise clear sky and stepped farther away from the fire, thinking perhaps it was the smoke, then deciding that it must be a cloud. I was wondering why the cloud hadn’t moved when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me. “I believe that’s the Milky Way,” Mr. Wilkerson said, looking up at the sky. “No kidding.” He held up his hand and traced out the constellations for me, the points of the Southern Cross. He was a slight, soft-spoken man with round glasses and pasty blond hair. Initially I had guessed he spent his life indoors, an accountant or professor. I noticed, though, as the day had passed, that he possessed all sorts of practical knowledge, the kinds of things I had never got around to knowing but wished that I had. He could talk at length with Francis about Land Rover engines, had his tent up before I drove in my first stake, and seemed to know the name of every bird and every tree that we saw. I wasn’t surprised, then, when he told me that he had spent his childhood in Kenya, on a tea plantation in the White Highlands. He seemed reluctant to talk about the past; he said only that his family had sold the land after independence and had moved back to England, to settle in a quiet suburb of London. He had gone to medical school, then practiced with the National Health Service in Liverpool, where he had met his wife, a psychiatrist. After a few years, he had convinced her to return with him to Africa. They had decided against living in Kenya, where there was a surplus of doctors relative to the rest of the continent, and instead settled on Malawi, where they both had worked under government contract for the past five years. “I oversee eight doctors for a region with a population of half a million,” he told me now. “We never have enough supplies—at least half of what the government purchases ends up on the black market. So we can only focus on the basic, which in Africa is really what’s needed anyway. People die from all sorts of preventable disease. Dysentery. Chicken pox. And now AIDS—the infection rate in some villages has reached fifty percent. It can be quite maddening.” The stories were grim, but as he continued to tell me the tasks of his life—digging wells, training outreach workers to inoculate children, distributing condoms—he seemed neither cynical nor sentimental. I asked him why he thought he had come back to Africa and he answered without a pause, as if he’d heard the question many times.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The snake- child grew up to be my Ama. Her snakes vined up the length of her legs and whisked around her waist when she walked. Ama and her snakes were saints: Shamans and priests asked to see what they’d grown from, flipping up Ama’s skirt, but the snakes bit their wrists blue. She whistled to wake them. Ama tapped each one on the head, their eyes milk-lit. She fed them mice from the fields and rats from the gutters on both sides of the road and turtles swept out of the river by typhoons and minnows the size of her pinkies. The farmers who once wanted to dam the river, the ones who never dared to visit the indigenous township for anything other than cheap millet wine, now came in pairs to pet the snakes under her skirts. The year Ama turned fourteen, the river railed against the fields. Typhoons tore up the fences and the hens that weren’t tied down in baskets were swallowed into the sky. Ama straddled the narrowest part of the river to piss into it. When she pissed, the snakes lunged open their mouths. The farmers said she was the one poisoning the water, turning it rancid, handcuffing the crops to the soil so they wouldn’t grow. But they wouldn’t hurt the girl who hissed piss out of a snake’s mouth. When the river stood up again in the banks, Ama ran outside. Ama’s snakes were bobbing out the bottom of her skirt, leashing her to the river. She walked toward the water that begged to be beaten, its surface a skin, and waded in to her knees. Her leftmost snake extended itself like an arm and then doubled back, its head pointing between her legs. It entered her body and nosed its way up her asshole. The right snake looped around itself too, turning toward her body and hooking its head into her vagina. The middle snake, the one thick as her wrist, lifted itself to Ama’s lips. Opened its eyes in the dark of her mouth. Her teeth were pried apart. The snake shimmied down her throat and she couldn’t breathe until it entered her belly. All three snakes snapped off at the crotch-root, two convening in her stomach, one in her womb. Ama pissed and shat and birthed at the same time, baby snakes streaming out of her. The river hooded over her head and she opened her mouth underwater, exhaling snakes. They poured out from her mouth and anus and vagina by the dozens, writhing away from the radius of her belly. It was a new breed no one had seen before, rain-red. When the rain ended, the river returned to its socket, the shape of a spine misaligned. The mud returned to its color, but the snakes inside remained red. They browsed the water for meat. The army * discarded its prisoners here, holing the boys’ wrists to thread a wire through.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The Cavendish Ladies’ Club it was called; and it was situated in Sackville Street, just up from Piccadilly. I knew the road well, I knew all those roads; yet I had never noticed the building - the slender, grey-faced building - to which Diana now had Shilling drive us. Its step, I suppose, is rather shadowy, and its name-plate is small, and its door is narrow; having visited it once, however, I never missed it again.Go to Sackville Street today, if you like, and try to spot it: you shall walk the length of the pavement, quite three or four times. But when you find the grey-faced building, rest a moment looking up at it; and if you see a lady cross its shadowy threshold, mark her well.She will walk - as I walked with Diana that day - into a lobby: the lobby is smart-looking, and in it sits a neat, plain, ageless woman behind a desk. When I first went there, this woman was named Miss Hawkins. She was ticking entries in a ledger as we arrived, but looked up when she saw Diana, and gave a smile. When she saw me, the smile grew smaller.She said, ‘Mrs Lethaby, ma’am, how pleasant! Mrs Jex is expecting you in the day-room, I believe.’ Diana nodded, and reached to sign her name upon a sheet. Miss Hawkins glanced again at me. ‘Shall the gentleman be waiting for you, here?’ she said.Diana’s pen moved smoothly on, and she did not raise her eyes. She said: ‘Don’t be tiresome, Hawkins. This is Miss King, my companion.’ Miss Hawkins looked harder at me, then blushed.‘Well, I’m sure, Mrs Lethaby, I can’t speak for the ladies; but some might consider this a little - irregular.’‘We are here,’ answered Diana, screwing the pen together, ‘for the sake of the irregular.’ Then she turned and looked me over, raising a hand to twitch at my necktie, licking the tip of one glove-clad finger to smooth at my brow, and finally plucking the hat from my head and arranging my hair.The hat she left for Miss Hawkins to deal with. Then she put her arm securely through mine, and led me up a flight of stairs into the day-room.This room, like the lobby below it, is grand. I cannot say what colour they have it now; in those days it was panelled in golden damask, and its carpets were of cream, and its sofas blue ...

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Unknown. I am calling from Trinidad. I watched it all and have taken it all in. I have been taking in some of the dialogues and pieces on Facebook, but being outside the U.S. context has given me space to see how I enjoy this album. There is something I feel being spoken through her in a spiritual and ancestral way. I haven’t seen in my lifetime a Black woman’s sexuality being expressed in this way on the world stage and world platform. At this time. There is so much, it is so powerful that it is happening in an age of social media. There is a dynamic of theory from academia and praxis coming from those who don’t operate in that space [chorus: Yes!]. I feel like one of the things, from being outside the academic space, just emerging and immersing myself here, as a dual citizen, having this album speak to me from outside of that academic space, which had limited my ability to feel these things, happy about my sexuality, in my body, that maybe my sexuality and the ways I express it is mainstream. I feel that somehow there is something larger happening. Beyoncé’s Grammy Performance Was a Gilded Afrofuturist Dream A moment of reverence for the exquisite symbology of healing that is Beyoncé in the last moment of the performance.90 After the last woman, a white woman, surrenders to her (which, in most parallel universes, would have foreshadowed her inevitable slaying of the awards)—we are left with Beyoncé, timeless and holy, face-to-face with the camera, her full mother-breasts gleaming, her nails sharp enough to protect against any who would harm her family, her face that of a woman who has learned the sacred witchcraft of healing, who has grown a universe in the landscape of her broken heart. This performance is, like the best Black speculative work, a spell we cast for a liberated, abundant Black future. The healing we need will require the creative abundance of so many Black women stepping into our wholeness. Lemonade. Masterpiece. it’s Black love the next chapter of Her visual album, with direct responses to partition and jealous and drunk in love and blue and to herself just then across both the visuals and the lyrics “grief sedated by orgasm orgasm heightened by grief god was in the room … sometimes when her nipple was in his mouth she’d whisper oh my god that too was a form of worship”91 Black womanhood and our pain and our irresistibility and our grief from serena’s perfection to the mothers of the slain the adoration of the natural world water everywhere moon to flood reflection to truth the journey all over Black america the love of Black girls and griots the use of witchcraft, magic, dreams and spells to heal the heartbreak transformation, transformative justice the power of love, vulnerability, walking away until you can be seen in your wholeness— truth and reconciliation “there is a curse that will be broken”92

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  RF. Zizi, you speak as if you know better than anyone, that you have the magic of just knowing, that you have the secret of all secrets; you always say “there is a secret inside a secret of a secret,” that you are beyond everything and everyone. We, on the other hand, are trying to practice humility, we want to become nothing, we believe that if humans reach a point where they know they are just a moment in time, then we can all just relax and just be and enjoy our cigarettes. We just want to reach the point where we know and believe that death and birth are the only guarantees, and love, for sure love. Does that get on your nerves? What if we pause and say that without humility one cannot love or maintain love? By love, we mean creating a safe and solid space for the people we care about to be themselves, to allow for a mutual growth for everyone involved, to be extremely sensitive. Zizi. My dear Rocca Family, if you plan on repeating and/or quoting and adhering to the Zizi, please learn your lessons right. Zizi says: The secret is a secret inside a secret, and it can only be truly obtained if you do nothing and everything. Pahleeze. Let me remind you of what Zizi declared cosmically some time ago or never: Everything Zizi says is possibly the truth and also probably a big lie. Zizi never promised to declare fiction from reality. And Zizi continuously as long as Zizi lives will remain true to changing her mind. My dear Rocca Family, those who claim they know are full of BS gone bad. One can, at best, claim to know to the best of their knowledge. We seek. And continue to seek. Until it all goes silent. And Zizi likes you saying: “We, on the other hand, are trying to practice humility, we want to become nothing.” You may have chosen a tough journey. You continue by saying: “We believe that if humans…” Zizi recommends you drop the “believe” notion. How about you suggest, try, attempt (maybe trust) this or that, rather than believe? There is very little space for humility in belief. The pleasure hidden secret like a whisper in the sharp pain of freezing breath venturing into your lungs hiking up the mountain of all beauties. Literally. Or is it breath sharply taken in, gentle like a whisper, sharp like glass, to defrost your lungs in the freezing winters? Does it matter, the difference? The pleasure deep in the pain of witnessing your breath in front of, in the presence of, magic, beauty, ancient nature before and after your birth and your death. As for love: How dare anyone ever claim the life of another? In any shape or form? Via love or hate? Via human trafficking or marriage? The channel does not matter. You hardly own yourself let alone any others. [image file=image_rsrc3M3.jpg] 97. Fucking period.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Zizi. Are you there yet? When you arrive at too much curiosity, call me. Curiosity is about listening to the answer when you ask a question. Curiosity involves sitting back, being quiet, and listening and watching. And then curiosity is about falling asleep to a world of wonder; go for the rides in dreamland and tell your dreams (only the interesting ones) to a fellow curious. Curiosity is also about sitting back with your emotion and living it. If you get too excited with your curiosity, grab a drink, go out for a smoke, take a break, be lazy, be slow. Some Zizi teachings: Life brings us pains, lick them. Life brings us unknowns, chew them. Life brings us germs, take them. Sip them. When it is most challenging, consider offering your body. Seek the monster under the bed. Let there be pee. Embarrass yourself. Surrender to Zizi tonight, and you shall be free. 94 My sweet.95 Shamiest of shame, embarassingliest of embarrassment. Nothing is shame, O Rocca Family, but shame.96 I have a big belly and I love my belly. [repeat]97 Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.98 Life is but a moment.The Power to Make LightA Conversation with Dallas Goldtooth Dallas Goldtooth is the Keep It in the Ground organizer at the Indigenous Environmental Network, and a founder of the political comedy troupe the 1491s and was a trustworthy spokesperson on the ground at Standing Rock, which was a radical mass action to stop a pipeline from being built on Indigenous-held lands. amb. One of my theories is that, right now, movements are spaces that people rarely want to enter or stay around because our tone is so serious, so dire, that people are just like “I’m already fucking hopeless, and you look burnt out and tired, and why would I come spend time there?” Dallas, you use humor to draw people in. Was there a time in your life when it was like, “Oh, I’m fucking hilarious. I’m gonna do something with this.” You know, was it sort of like, “I’m gonna go be a comedian—oh wait, I’ve gotta still be an activist.”

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  You bet on a bunch of them and hope that one or two hit it big. As for the wasteful spending, the investors may not like it, but what they really care about is the end game. If Halligan and Shah deliver a big return for their investors, they can have all the free beer and British phone booths and Fearless Fridays they want. What’s more, whatever money they’re spending on cool offices and the frat- house parties, it’s peanuts compared to everything else. “And think what they’re getting in return for that,” he says. “They’re getting all these young kids who work cheap and don’t stick around long enough to vest, and even if they do vest, they don’t have much equity to begin with. When you look at it that way, the perks seem pretty cheap.” You could argue that HubSpot would be better off investing in software development, rather than spending money to throw a big conference every year, and hiring Cyndi Lauper and Arianna Huffington to entertain people. “On the other hand,” Thomas says, “what they’re doing seems to be working.” I’m a bit taken aback. Thomas is a hardcore engineer, and a frugal manager. His company is way bigger than HubSpot, but he’s not throwing money around. Nevertheless, he admires them. The way he seems to think about business is the way I imagine political operatives think about candidates, where all that matters is whether they can say the right things and get themselves elected. “You know,” he says, “I have an idea for you.” He suggests I should forget about trying to become a marketer, but stay at HubSpot anyway. “Think of yourself as an anthropologist,” he says. “Like you’ve been dropped into some strange culture, and you’re studying their rituals. You could maybe write about it. It might be interesting.” We finish our coffees and say our goodbyes. When I get to my car, his comment about being an anthropologist stays with me. Wet snow is falling, fat flakes falling on my windshield. The stores are decorated for Christmas. People hurry past on the sidewalk, carrying shopping bags, bundled against the cold. Thomas is right about the people at HubSpot. They really are like a strange tribe. What’s more, tribes like this are popping up all over the place. A new kind of workplace has emerged, with culture codes and frat-house parties and rhetoric about making the world a better place. But the real story is not just about the free beer and the foosball tables and the talk about being on an important mission—the real story is about why those things exist.

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

  form together the naov", or temple hall; in the Western the choir and the sanctuary are put together under the name cancelli or chancel. 3. The most holy place,1153 or the choir proper;1154 called also in distinction from the lower choir, the high choir,1155 for the priests, and for the offering of the sacrifice of the Eucharist. No layman, excepting the emperor (in the east), might enter it. It was semi-circular or conchoidal1156 in form, and was situated at the eastern end of the church, opposite the entrance doors, because the light, to which Christians should turn themselves, comes from the east.1157 It was separated from the other part of the church by rails or a lattice,1158 and by a curtain, or by sacred doors called in the Greek church the picture-wall, iconostas, on account of the sacred paintings on it.1159 While in the Eastern churches this screen is still used, it in time gave place in the West to a low balustrade. In the middle of the sanctuary stood the altar,1160 generally a table, or sometimes a chest with a lid; at first of wood, then, after the beginning of the sixth century, of stone or marble, or even of silver and gold, with a wall behind it, and an overshadowing, dome-shaped canopy,1161 above which a cross was usually fixed. The altar was hollow, and served as the receptacle for the relics of the martyrs; it was placed, where this was possible, exactly over the grave of a martyr, probably with reference to the passage in the Revelation: "I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held."1162 Often a subterranean chapel or crypt1163 was built under the church, in order to have the church exactly upon the burial place of the saint, and at the same time to keep alive the memory of the primitive worship in underground vaults in the times of persecution. The altar held therefore the twofold office of a tomb (though at the same time the monument of a new, higher life), and a place of sacrifice. It was manifestly the most holy place in the entire church, to which everything else had regard; whereas in Protestantism the pulpit and the word of God come into the foreground, and altar and sacrament stand back. Hence the altar was adorned also in the richest manner with costly cloths, with the cross, or at a later period the crucifix, with burning tapers, symbolical of Christ the light of the world,1164 and previously consecrated for ecclesiastical use,1165 with a splendid copy of the Holy Scriptures, or the mass-book, but above all with the tabernacle, or little house for preserving the consecrated host, on which in the middle ages the German stone-cutters and sculptors displayed wonderful art. Side altars did not come into use until Gregory the Great. Ignatius,1166 Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, and Augustine know of only one altar in the church.

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

  Heaven includes three kinds of rewards, said Bonaventura: the substantial reward or the vision of God; the consubstantial or the glorification of the body to which belong the qualities of transpicuity, lightness, agility, and impassibility which are granted in the degree we exercise love here on earth;1830 and the accidental reward or the ornament of the aureole given for preaching and leading others to salvation, for virginal purity and martyrdom. The bliss of heaven, said Thomas Aquinas, consists in the immediate vision of God.1831 It is a state from which there will be no lapse. The beatified know what is occurring on earth, hear the prayers that ascend to them, and by their merits intercede for their brethren here. St. Bernard, in his homilies on the Canticles,1832 and Anselm1833 give us lofty descriptions of the blessedness of the heavenly estate. And the satisfaction and glory of the soul in heaven has never been quite so well portrayed as in the poem of Bernard of Cluny:— O sweet and blessed country, the home of God’s elect, O sweet and blessed country, that eager hearts expect; Jesus in mercy bring us to that sweet land of rest, To be with God the Father and Spirit ever blest. It remained for Dante to give to the chilling scholastic doctrines of purgatory and the lower regions a terrible reality in poetical form and imagery and also to describe the beatific vision of paradise. The remarkable vision which a certain Englishman, Turchill, had of the future world, as related at length by Roger of Wendover1834 and others, reveals the crass popular ideas of the future state. St. Julian appeared to this honest laborer, and took him off to "the middle of the world," where they entered a church which, as Turchill was told, received the souls of all those who had recently died. Mary, through her intercession, had brought it about that all souls born again should, as soon as they left the body, be taken to this church and so be freed from the attacks of demons. Near one of the church walls was the entrance to hell through which came a most foul stench. Stretching from another wall was the great lake of purgatorial fire in which souls were immersed, some to their knees, some to their necks. And above the lake was a bridge, paved with thorns and stakes, over which all had to pass before they could arrive at the mount of joy. Those who were not assisted by special masses walked over the bridge very slowly and with excruciating pain. On the mount was a great and most wonderful church which seemed to be large enough to contain all the inhabitants of the world. St. Nicolas, St. James, and other saints had charge of the church of Mary and the purgatorial lake and bridge. Turchill also saw St. Peter in the church of Mary and before him the souls were brought to receive sentence.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Cara. Wow. Get the fuck out. Get out. I always wondered where she was. That’s amazing. So I was studying with her. And she very much embodied “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” She really put us in the practice of knowing our bodies. As part of theatrical performance. How do you explore, as big bodies, small bodies, Black bodies, queer bodies? How do you expand and contract? And take up space, and show pleasure, show fear, show anger? And then, very much, Rhodessa Jones. I had an inkling of time with her, who very similarly pushed me to my edges. And Adrienne Kennedy. She’s a Black British playwright. And she was really getting popular during the nineties. And Aishah Rahman. Just incredible Black playwrights and poets. And you could see how they were integrating the spiritual, the spirit, with Black women’s narratives. And it felt very healing. To not only lift up the story but to understand that we are surrounded by ancestors and to ask, where is our practice and our connection to holding a generational history of trauma? I didn’t have a language for it, but, boy, was I writing it. I was writing about how we unpack, unravel, how we disassociate from ourselves with these incredible histories of colonialist violence and genocide. And I think that when I came into theater, I walked through it and came out on the other side, and was like, oh, this is about something else. This is about vibration. This is about how we transform the frequencies we’re living inside. I started doing work in my mid-twenties with Black women who had tumors because I was steeped in reproductive health and justice and it made sense to me: Let us honor what is happening to our bodies, the histories of trauma we are holding in our bodies that block us from desire. I worked with some women with diabetes, or different illnesses, asking that we consider these illnesses as manifestations of oppression and slavery, self-hatred, and attempted genocide. And how do you transform these very dense masses in the body into feeling that you can fly, and you can move, and have different shapes? I know you know working with shapes in the body.41 And I started to work with sound. In particular with Black women. And, mind you, I was also very cognizant that we had a lot of folks, in many different cultures, in Asia, in Latin America, using sound. I didn’t practice, I didn’t have a teacher. I just kind of went with it using my performance to lead me into, oh, vibration is vibration.

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

  I slumped forward, barely nodding. He smiled, and rolled up one of his pant legs to scratch his calf. I noticed a series of indented scars that ran from his ankle halfway up his shin. “What are those?” “Leech marks,” he said. “From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while you’re hiking through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they’re stuck there, fat with blood. You sprinkle salt on them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife.” I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been singed. I asked Lolo if it had hurt. “Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.” We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts. A queer notion suddenly sprang into my head. “Have you ever seen a man killed?” I asked him. He glanced down, surprised by the question. “Have you?” I asked again. “Yes,” he said. “Was it bloody?” “Yes.” I thought for a moment. “Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” “Because he was weak.” “That’s all?” Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. “That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?” I didn’t answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. “Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.” My mother watched us from inside the house, propped up at her desk grading papers. What are they talking about? she wondered to herself. Blood and guts, probably; swallowing nails. Cheerful, manly things.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I told Ben I’d dreamt of eating the goose. We were lying on our backs on the baseball diamond, her right hand perched on my belly, restless. Her hand hatched all our plans: When she made a fist and opened it, I knew it meant there was a fledgling idea inside it. In my backyard that evening, Ben and I untethered the goose from the fence. In the center of the yard, the 口 was open. Trust me, Ben said, holding the end of the leash. Ben made a clucking noise with her tongue, coaxing the goose to the center of the yard. Following Ben and the goose to the 口, I watched her kneel beside the hole and grip the goose in both hands, tamping its wings down. She lowered it feet-first into the hole, its wings battling her hands. I asked her what she was doing and she said, Birthing it. I said no, this was sacrifice, this was smothering. Ben said, All mouths require feeding. The hole sucked it out of her hands, swallowed it down. Only the leash was uneaten. Ben reeled the rope out of the hole. We stood back, toeing the soil to see if it was tame again. It hiccupped beneath our feet, then burped hot steam in our faces. That night, I visited the hole to see if it had finished digesting. Shoveling my hands into the hole, I groped for its gag reflex. The second letter lolled out like a tongue, wet with some other country’s rain. I told you it wanted meat, Ben said, as I tugged out the letter. When the 口 dilated back to the width of our heads, we reached in and pulled out fistfuls of bird bones crumbling to salt. The skeleton of Dayi’s goose-baby. One of the bones we recovered was a rib, the other a wishbone. We each held one end of the forked bone, breaking it between us. The bone-halves jerked in our fists after we broke them, magnetizing back together. Where they touched, the bones welded themselves, glowing. Above us, crows gathered to knit the night. Ben and I tried to break the bone again, to seduce it from symmetry, but the wishbone flew out of our fists. It hovered above our heads, growing a body around itself. Rot in reverse: The wishbone fattened into fleshcoat and feathers, feet forking from a torso. It rose to join the crows, a goose threading in and out of the flock, going home. _ After her last stroke, the one that made her forget our names, Dayi decided to go back to the island. She said it was time for her to die on someone else’s dime. On her last night, we walked to the reservoir again, tossing the geese everything we could find in the reeds and bushes: bits of hot dog bun, fishbone, pieces of a broken Frisbee. Dayi searched the sky for a red goose, mistaking the sun for hers.

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

  The first known Christian hermit, as distinct from the earlier ascetics, is the fabulous Paul of Thebes, in Upper Egypt. In the twenty-second year of his age, during the Decian persecution, A.D. 250, he retired to a distant cave, grew fond of the solitude, and lived there, according to the legend, ninety years, in a grotto near a spring and a palm tree, which furnished him food, shade, and clothing,307 until his death in 340. In his later years a raven is said to have brought him daily half a loaf, as the ravens ministered to Elijah. But no one knew of this wonderful saint, till Anthony, who under a higher impulse visited and buried him, made him known to the world. After knocking in vain for more than an hour at the door of the hermit, who would receive the visits of beasts and reject those of men, he was admitted at last with a smiling face, and greeted with a holy kiss. Paul had sufficient curiosity left to ask the question, whether there were any more idolaters in the world, whether new houses were built in ancient cities and by whom the world was governed? During this interesting conversation, a large raven came gently flying and deposited a double portion of bread for the saint and his guest. "The Lord," said Paul, "ever kind and merciful, has sent us a dinner. It is now sixty years since I have daily received half a loaf, but since thou hast come, Christ has doubled the supply for his soldiers." After thanking the Giver, they sat down by the fountain; but now the question arose who should break the bread; the one urging the custom of hospitality, the other pleading the right of his friend as the elder. This question of monkish etiquette, which may have a moral significance, consumed nearly the whole day, and was settled at last by the compromise that both should seize the loaf at opposite ends, pull till it broke, and keep what remained in their hands. A drink from the fountain, and thanksgiving to God closed the meal. The day afterward Anthony returned to his cell, and told his two disciples: "Woe to me, a sinner, who have falsely pretended to be a monk. I have seen Elijah and John in the desert; I have seen St. Paul in paradise." Soon afterward he paid St. Paul a second visit, but found him dead in his cave, with head erect and hands lifted up to heaven. He wrapped up the corpse, singing psalms and hymns, and buried him without a spade; for two lions came of their own accord, or rather from supernatural impulse, from the interior parts of the desert, laid down at his feet, wagging their tails, and moaning distressingly, and scratched a grave in the sand large enough for the body of the departed saint of the desert! Anthony returned with the coat of Paul, made of palm leaves, and wore it on the solemn days of Easter and Pentecost.

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

  Two years after this, Ambrose himself was fatally sick. All Milan was in terror. When he was urged to pray God for a lengthening of his life, he answered: "I have so lived among you that I cannot be ashamed to live longer; but neither do I fear to die; for we have a good Lord." During his sickness he had miraculous intimations and heard heavenly voices, and he himself related that Christ appeared to him smiling. His notary and biographer, the deacon Paulinus, who adorns his life throughout with miraculous incidents, tells us:2087 "Not long before his death, while he was dictating to me his exposition of the Forty-third Psalm, I saw upon his head a flame in the form of a small shield; hereupon his face became white as snow, and not till some time after did it return to its natural color." In the night of Good Friday, on Saturday, the 4th of April, 397, he died, at the age of fifty-seven years, having first spent several hours, with his hands crossed, in uninterrupted prayer. Even Jews and pagans lamented his death. On the night of Easter following many were baptized in the church where his body was exposed Not a few of the newly baptized children saw him seated in the episcopal chair with a shining star upon his head. Even after his death he wrought miracles in many places, in proof of which Paulinus gives his own experience, credible persons, and documents.

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

  Yet this is not to say that much may not still be learned, in the sphere of discipline, from those councils, and that perhaps many an ancient custom or institution is not worthy to be revived in the spirit of evangelical freedom. The moral character of those councils was substantially parallel with that of earlier and later ecclesiastical assemblies, and cannot therefore be made a criterion of their historical importance and their dogmatic authority. They faithfully reflect both the light and the shade of the ancient church. They bear the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels. If even among the inspired apostles at the council of Jerusalem there was much debate,634 and soon after, among Peter, Paul, and Barnabas, a violent, though only temporary collision, we must of course expect much worse of the bishops of the Nicene and the succeeding age, and of a church already interwoven with a morally degenerate state. Together with abundant talents, attainments, and virtues, there were gathered also at the councils ignorance, intrigues, and partisan passions, which had already been excited on all sides by long controversies preceding and now met and arrayed themselves, as hostile armies, for open combat. For those great councils, all occasioned by controversies on the most important and the most difficult problems of theology, are, in fact, to the history of doctrine, what decisive battles are to the history of war. Just because religion is the deepest and holiest interest of man, are religious passions wont to be the most violent and bitter; especially in a time when all classes, from imperial court