Bewilderment

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 Divine Comedy (1950)

  “The wound which Mary closed and anointed, she who is so beauteous at her feet opened and thrust. In the order which the third rank maketh sitteth below her, Rachael with Beatrice, even as thou seest. Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, and her from whom, third in descent, the singer came who for grief at his sin cried out have pity on me! these mayst thou see from rank to rank descending;1 even as I, naming their proper names, go down the rose petal by petal.2 And down from the seventh onward, even as thereto, follow Hebrew dames, disparting all the flower’s locks; because, accordant with the way faith looked to Christ, these are the partition-wall whereat the sacred steps are parted. On this side, wherein the flower is mature in all its petals; are seated who believe in Christ to come. On the other side, where they are broke by empty seats, abide in semi-circles such as had their signt turned towards Christ come. And as on the one side the glorious seat of the Lady of heaven and the other seats below it make so great partition, so, over against her, doth the seat of that great John who ever holy endured the desert and the martyr death and thereafter Hell for two years’ space;3 and beneath him the making of such severance hath been assigned to Francis, Benedict and Augustine, and others down to here from circle unto circle. Now marvel at the deep divine provision; for either aspect of the faith, in equal measure shall fill full this garden. And know that, downward from the rank which in mid line cleaveth the two divisions, in virtue of no merit of their own they have their seats, but by another’s, under fixed conditions; for these are spirits all released ere they had exercised true choice. Well mayst thou perceive it by their faces, and also their child voices if thou look aright and if thou listen. Now thou art perplexed, and in perplexity thou keepest silence; but I will loose the hard knot for thee wherein thy subtle thoughts are binding thee. Within this kingdom’s amplitude no chance point may have place, no more than sadness may nor thirst, nor hunger; because established by eternal law is whatsoe’er thou seest, so that the correspondence is exact between the ring and finger.4 Wherefore this swift-sped folk to the true life is here, not without cause, more or less excellent in mutual order. The King through whom this realm resteth in so great love and in so great delight that never will hath daring for aught more, as he createth all minds in his own glad sight, doth at his pleasure with grace endow them diversely; and here let the effect suffice.5 And this, express and clear, is noted unto you in Holy Writ, anent those twins whose wrath was stirred within their mother’s womb.6

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The other two looked on, and each cried: “O me! Agnello., now thou changest! lo, thou art already neither two nor one!” The two heads had now become one, when two shapes appeared to us mixed in one face, where both were lost. Two arms were made of the four lists; the thighs with the legs, the belly, and the chest, became such members as were never seen. The former shape was all extinct in them: both, and neither the peverse image seemed; and such it went away with languid step. As the lizard, beneath the mighty scourge of the canicular days, going from hedge to hedge, appears a flash of lightning, if it cross the way: so, coming towards the bowels of the other two, appeared a little reptile burning with rage, livid and black as peppercorn. And it pierced that part, in one of them, at which we first receive our nourishment; then fell down stretched out before him. The pierced thief gazed on it but said nothing; nay, with his feet motionless, yawned only as if sleep or fever had come upon him. He eyed the reptile, the reptile him; the one from his wound, the other from its mouth, smoked violently, and their smoke met. Let Lucan now be silent, where he tells of poor Sabellus and Nasidius;6 and wait to hear that which is now sent forth. Of Cadmus and of Arethusa be Ovid silent: for if he, poetizing, converts the one into a serpent and the other into a fount, I envy him not: for never did he so transmute two natures front to front, that both forms were ready to exchange their substance. They mutually responded in such a way, that the reptile cleft its tail into a fork, and the wounded spirit drew his steps together. The legs and the thighs along with them so stuck to one another, that soon their juncture left no mark that was discernible. The cloven tail assumed the figure that was lost in the other; and its skin grew soft, the other’s hard. I saw the arms enter at the armpits, and the two feet of the brute, which were short, lengthen themselves as much as those arms were shortened. Then the two hinder feet, twisted together, became the member which man conceals; and the wretch from his had two thrust forth. Whilst the smoke with a new colour veils them both, and generates on one part hair, and strips it from another, the one rose upright, and prostrate the other fell, not therefore turning the impious lights, under which they mutually exchanged visages. He that was erect, drew his towards the temples; and from the too much matter that went thither, ears came out of the smooth cheeks; that which went not back, but was retained, of its superfluity formed a nose, and enlarged the lips to a fit size.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  But, that what now appeareth not may be apparent, think who he was, and what the cause which moved him—when he was bidden: ‘Choose,’—to make demand.9 I have not spoken so but that thou mayst perceive he was a king, who chose such wit that as a king he might be adequate; not to know the number in which exist the mover spirits here above, nor if a necessary and a contingent premise can ever give a necessary conclusion; nor whether we must grant a primum motum; nor whether in a semi-circle can be constructed a triangle that shall have no right angle.10 Wherefore, (if this and all that I have said thou note) that insight without peer whereon the arrow of my intention smiteth, is regal prudence. And if to rose thou turn discerning eyes, thou shalt see that it hath respect only to kings, the which are many and the good ones few. Thus qualified do thou accept my saying; and so it may consist with what thou holdest of the first father and of our delight. And let this ever be lead to thy feet, to make thee move slow, like a weary man; both to the yea and nay thou seest not; for he is right low down amongst the fools who maketh affirmation or negation without distinction between case and case;11 wherefore it chanceth many times swift-formed opinion leaneth the wrong way, and then conceit bindeth the intellect. Far worse than vainly doth he leave the shore, since he returneth not as he puts forth, who fisheth for the truth and hath not the art; and of this to the world are open proofs, Parmenides, Melissus, Bryson,12 and the host who still were going, but they knew not whither. So did Sabellius and Arius,13 and those fools who were as swords unto the Scripture, in making the straight countenances crooked.14 Let not folk yet be too secure in judgment, as who should count the ears upon the field ere they be ripe; for I have seen first all the winter through the thorn display itself hard and forbidding and then upon its summit bear the rose; and I have seen ere now a ship fare straight and swift over the sea through her entire course, and perish at the last, entering the harbour mouth. Let not Dame Bertha or Squire Martin15 think, if they perceive one steal and one make offering, they therefore see them as in the divine counsel; for the one yet may rise and the other fall.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The photos were of pretty party people—young strangers making sultry, self-serious faces. Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils, some caught unawares by the loud white flash of my camera, others posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles. Some photos appeared to have been taken on a downtown street at night, others in a dark, low-ceilinged interior with Day-Glo fake graffiti on the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody in the photos. In one, a group of six clubgoers huddled together, each holding up a middle finger. In another, a skinny redhead flashed her breasts, revealing lavender pasties. A chubby black boy in a fedora and tuxedo T-shirt blew smoke rings. Male twins dressed as heroin-thin Elvises in slouchy gold lamé suits high-fived in front of a Basquiat rip-off. There was a girl holding a rat on a leash hooked to the bicycle chain she wore around her neck. A close-up shot showed someone’s pale pink tongue, split to look like a snake’s and pierced on both forks with big diamond studs. There was a series of snapshots taken in what I guessed was the line for the toilet. The whole place looked like some arty rave. “Expect road closures, hurricane force gales, coastal flooding,” the weatherman was saying. I dug the remote out from between the sofa cushions and turned the TV off. One photo had fallen under the coffee table. I picked it up and flipped it over. A small Asian man stood still and apart from the crowd at the bar. He wore blue coveralls splattered in paint. I looked closely. He had a round face and ruddy acne scars. His eyes were closed. He seemed familiar. Then I recognized him. It was Ping Xi. There was a streak of pink glitter across his cheeks. I put the photo down. • • • IT HAD BEEN MONTHS since I’d even thought of Ping Xi. Whenever Ducat had popped into my mind, I’d tried to winnow my focus down to the simple memory of the long walk to the Eighty-sixth Street subway station, the express train to Union Square, the L train across town, the walk up Eighth Avenue and left on Twenty-third Street, the hobble over the old cobblestones in my high heels. Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I’d met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the secondrate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned to South America and had decided that whatever affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski champion. They were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was “building a family” as he put it, he would have no time henceforth for my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.” Busybodies—a whole committee of them, it appeared—had informed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were unknown, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. He had broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a brunette in white wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And when my answer was heard, Sordello and he shrank back like folk suddenly bewildered. The one turned to Virgil, and the other to one who was seated there, crying: “Up, Conrad,5 come and see what God by his grace hath willed.” Then turning to me: “By that especial grace which thou owest to him who so hideth his first purpose that there is no ford to it, when thou art beyond the wide waters, tell my Giovanna that she pray for me there where the innocent are heard. I do not think her mother loves me more, since she hath changed her white wimples, which hapless she must long for once again. By her right easily may be known, how long the fire of love doth last in woman, if eye and touch do not oft rekindle it. The viper that the Milanese blazons on his shield will not make her so fair a tomb as Gallura’s cock would have done.” Thus spake he, his countenance stamped with the mark of that righteous zeal which in due measure glows in the breast. My yearning eyes were again turned towards heaven, even there where the stars are slowest, like a wheel nearest the axle. And my leader: “Son, what gazest thou at up there?” And I to him: “At those three torches, wherewith the whole pole here is flaming.” And he to me: “The four bright stars which thou sawest this morn are low on the other side, and these are risen where they were.”6 As he was speaking, lo Sordello drew him to himself, saying: “See there our adversary,” and pointed his finger so that he should look thither. On that side where the little vale hath no rampart, was a snake, perchance such as gave to Eve the bitter food. Through the grass and the flowers came the evil reptile, turning round now and again its head to its back, licking like a beast that sleeks itself. I saw not, and therefore cannot tell, how the celestial falcons moved; but full well I saw both in motion. Hearing the green wings cleave through the air, the serpent fled, and the angels wheeled around, flying in equal measure back to their posts. The shade5 that had drawn close to the judge when he called, through all that assault was not loosed a moment from gazing at me. “So may that light which guideth thee on high, find in thy will as much wax as is needful to reach the enamelled summit,” it began, “if thou know true tidings of Valdimacra, or of neighbouring parts, tell it me who once was mighty there. I was called Conrad Malaspina: not the elder am I, but descended from him: to mine own I bore that love which here is purified.” “Oh,” said I to him, “through your lands I ne’er have been, but where do men dwell throughout Europe to whom they are not renowned?

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  To Darwin, each species was a conceptual category—a population of unique individuals who vary from one another, with no essence at their core. The ideal dog doesn’t exist: it’s a statistical summary of many diverse dogs. No features are necessary, sufficient, or even typical of every individual in the population. This observation, known as population thinking, is central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. 10 Population thinking is based on variation, whereas essentialism is based on sameness. The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible. Origin is therefore a profoundly anti-essentialist book. So it is baffling that where emotion is concerned, Darwin reversed his greatest achievement by writing Expression. 11 It is equally baffling, not to mention ironic, that the classical view of emotion is based on the very essentialism that Darwin is famous for vanquishing in biology. The classical view explicitly labels itself as “evolutionary” and assumes that emotions and their expressions are products of natural selection, yet natural selection is completely absent from Darwin’s thinking on emotion. Any essentialist view that wraps itself in the cloak of Darwin is demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of Darwin’s central ideas about evolution. The compelling power of essentialism led Darwin to some beautifully ridiculous ideas about emotion. “Even insects,” he wrote in Expression, “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love” when they rub their body parts together to make sounds. Think about that the next time you’re chasing a fly in your kitchen. Darwin also wrote that emotional imbalance could cause frizzy hair. 12 Essentialism is not only powerful but also infectious. Darwin’s perplexing belief in unvarying emotion essences lived on after his death and distorted the legacy of other famous scientists. In the process, the classical view of emotion gained momentum. The most important example is that of William James, considered by many to be the father of American psychology. James might not be the household name that Darwin is, but he was, quite simply, an intellectual giant. His 1,200-page tome Principles of Psychology contains most of Western psychology’s most important ideas and remains, after more than a century, the foundation of the field. His name graces the highest honor that can be bestowed on a scientist from the Association of Psychological Science, the William James Prize, and Harvard’s psychology building is named William James Hall. James is widely cited for saying that each type of emotion—happiness, fear, and so on—has a distinct fingerprint in the body. This essentialist idea is a key fact of the classical view, and generations of James-influenced researchers have searched for those fingerprints in heartbeats, respiration, blood pressure, and other bodily markers (and have written some bestselling books on emotion). James’s statement has a catch, however: he never said it.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  This pattern was repeated throughout the hall. At a table near the front stage, Howard spotted Monty. He was sitting with a black girl who wore her hair in a similar style to Victoria’s. She and all the other students at the table were focused on Monty, presently speechifying in familiar style. ‘Your father’s here?’ ‘Yes,’ said Victoria innocently, spreading her white napkin over her white lap. ‘He’s Emerson – didn’t you know?’ For the first time it occurred to Howard that this gorgeous, single nineteen-year-old giving her attention to a -year-old married man (albeit with a full head of hair) might have other motives besides pure animal passion. Was he – as Levi would put it – being played? But Howard was disrupted from further thought on this subject by an old man in cap and gown who rose, welcomed them all and  On Beauty then said something long in Latin. The bell rang again. The servers entered. The overhead lights dimmed, allowing the table candles to offer their flickering illumination. The wine waiters went round, bending delicately over the diners’ left shoulders, and finishing each pour with an elegant twist of the bottle. The starter followed. This consisted of two of the shrimp Howard had spotted in the hall laid next to a bowl of clam chowder with its accompanying packet of croutons. Howard had spent ten years wrestling with these little packets of Wellington Town Croutons and had learned to leave them alone. Victoria ripped hers open and sent three flying into Howard’s chest. This made her laugh. Her laugh was charming – she was off-duty somehow when she laughed. But then the performance continued; she broke open her bread roll and spoke to him in that arch, satirical style she seemed to think was flirtatious. On his other side, a shy, plain girl visiting from M.I.T. was attempting to explain to him the kind of experimental physics she did. As he ate, Howard tried to listen. He made a point of asking her many interested questions; he hoped this would lessen the effect of Victoria’s frank disinterest. But after ten minutes he ran out of viable questions. Physicist and Art Historian met their match in technical terms that could not be translated, in two worlds that would not coalesce. Howard drank down his second glass of wine and excused himself to go to the toilet. ‘Howard! Hahahahaha! A nice place to meet. God, these things, eh? These fucking things. Once a year and it’s still too bloody often!’ It was Erskine, drunk, swaying. He came and stood beside Howard, unzipped himself. Howard could not piss next to people he knew.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  And I’m not doing it right now, ’cos I got other things cooking, but imma go back to it soon, ’cos it’s like – ’ ‘Don’t tell me,’ insisted Howard, closing his eyes. ‘Just don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’ Levi put the dollars in his back pocket. ‘Anyway, so in the meantime I got a bit of a cash flow situation . I pay you back, though.’ ‘With other money I’ll have given you.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘I got a job, I told you! Chill. OK? Will you chill? You gonna give yo’self a heart attack, man. Chill .’ Sighing, he kissed his father on his sweaty forehead and closed the door softly on his way out. Levi did his funky limp through the department and out into the main lobby of the Humanities Faculty building. He stopped here to select a tune that would fit the experience of stepping out of this building and facing the freeze outside. Somebody called his name. He couldn’t see at first who it was. ‘Yo – Levi . Over here! Hey, man! I ain’t seen your ass in the longest time, man. Put it there.’ ‘ Carl? ’ ‘Yeah, Carl. Don’t you even know me now?’ They touched fists, but with Levi frowning all the time. ‘What you doing here, man?’ ‘Damn – didn’t you know?’ said Carl, smiling cheesily and popping his collar. ‘I be a college man now!’ Levi laughed. ‘No, seriously, bro – what you doing here?’ Carl stopped smiling. He tapped the knapsack on his back. ‘Didn’t your sister tell you? I’m a college man now. I’m working here.’ ‘ Here? ’ ‘Black Studies Department. I just started – I’m an archivist.’ ‘A what ?’ Levi transferred his weight to the opposite foot. ‘Man, you screwing with me?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘You work here. I don’t get it – you cleaning?’ Levi didn’t mean this the way it came out. It was just that he had met a lot of Wellington cleaners on the march yesterday, and it was the first thing that came to his mind. Carl was offended. ‘No, man, I manage the archives – I don’t clean shit. It’s a music library – I’m in control of the hip-hop and some R & B and modern urban black music. It’s an amazing resource – you should come check it out.’  On Beauty Levi shook his head, disbelieving. ‘Carl, bro, I’m tripping . . . you gotta run this past me again. You’re working here? ’ Carl looked up over Levi’s head at the clock on the wall. He had an appointment to get to – he was meeting someone in the Modern Languages Department who was going to translate some French rap lyrics for him. ‘Yeah, man – it’s not that complicated a concept. I’m working here.’ ‘But . . .

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Through their massive connections, they broadcast predictions that alter what you see, hear, and otherwise perceive and do. That’s why, at the level of brain circuitry, no decision can be free of affect. ... I’ve said several times that the brain acts like a scientist. It forms hypotheses through prediction and tests them against the “data” of sensory input. It corrects its predictions by way of prediction error, like a scientist adjusts his or her hypotheses in the face of contrary evidence. When the brain’s predictions match the sensory input, this constitutes a model of the world in that instant, just like a scientist judges that a correct hypothesis is the path to scientific certainty. Several years ago, my family was eating dinner in our kitchen in Boston when suddenly, simultaneously, all of us had a sensation that was entirely new. Our chairs tipped backward for a moment, then righted themselves, but in a curvy sort of way like cresting an ocean wave. This completely novel experience left us in a state of experiential blindness, so we started forming hypotheses. Did we all simply lose our balance momentarily? No, that wasn’t likely to happen to three people at once. Did a car crash outside the house? No, we hadn’t heard anything. Had a building exploded far away, out of audible range, making the ground tremble? Maybe, but the feeling wasn’t so much a tremble as a swoop. What about an earthquake? Maybe, but we’d never been in an earthquake before, and ours had lasted only one second, much shorter than earthquakes we’d seen in disaster movies. However, the rising and falling shape, an almost sinusoidal motion, was consistent with our understanding of earthquakes. An earthquake was the best match to our knowledge, so we settled on that hypothesis. A few hours later, we learned that a magnitude 4.5 earthquake had struck in nearby Maine and rippled throughout New England. This same process of elimination that my family performed consciously, the brain does naturally, automatically, and extremely rapidly. Your brain has a mental model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed from past experience. This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the world and the body using concepts. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. I’ve been calling this process “categorization,” but it’s known by many other names in science. Experience. Perception. Conceptualization. Pattern completion. Perceptual inference. Memory. Simulation. Attention. Morality. Mental Inference. In the folk psychology of daily life, these words mean different things, and scientists often study them as different phenomena, assuming each is produced by a distinct process in the brain.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi pushed his headphones to one side on his head. ‘Say what ?’ You’d have thought that after all that effort of standing and calling out, the lady might have something important to say. My house is burning down. My cat is up a tree. But no. ‘Now, how are you?’ she said. ‘You don’t look so well.’ Levi replaced his headphones and began to walk away. But the  kipps and belsey lady was still waving her arms at him. He stopped again, took the headphones off and sighed. ‘Sister, I’ve had kind of a long day, a’right, so . . . unless there’s something I can do for you . . . You need help or something? Carrying something?’ The lady had managed to move forward now. She took two steps and then supported herself with both hands, gripping the porch fence. Her knuckles were grey and dusty. You could pluck bass notes on those veins. ‘I knew it. You live near here, don’t you?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘I feel sure I know your brother. I can’t be mistaken, at least I don’t think so,’ she said. Her head wobbled slightly as she spoke. ‘No, I’m not mistaken. Your faces are the same underneath. You have exactly the same cheekbones.’ Her accent, to Levi’s ears, was a shameful, comic thing. To Levi, black folk were city folk. People from the islands, people from the country, these were all peculiar to him, obstinately historical – he couldn’t quite believe in them. Like when Howard took the family to Venice and Levi could not shift the idea that the whole place and everybody in it were having him on. No roads? Water taxis? He felt the same way about farmers, anybody who wove anything and his Latin teacher. ‘Right . . . OK, well, I gotta go, man . . . got stuff to do . . . So . . . Don’t you stand up any more, sister, you’ll fall – I’m out now.’ ‘Wait!’ ‘Aw, man . . .’ Levi approached her and she did the weirdest thing: she clasped his hands. ‘I am interested to know what your mother is like.’ ‘My moms? What? Look, sister – ’ said Levi, releasing his hands from hers, ‘I think you got the wrong guy.’ ‘I will call on her, I think,’ she said. ‘I feel that she must be nice, from what I have seen of her family.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  While keeping your eyes closed, slowly contract the hand again into a fist; then once again open it. With the eyes still closed, focus all of your attention on this opening and closing as you repeat the movement. Notice how your awareness changes as you continue to be mindful of the sensations of this seemingly simple body activity . This little exercise may seem banal. However, to actually become aware of our body without being distracted by what’s going on around us or by our thoughts and images (about the action) can be truly a Herculean task. Yet it is a task with rich rewards. Our tendency is to identify with our thoughts to such an extent that we confuse them with reality; we believe that we are our thoughts. With this exercise you can detect the fundamental difference between your visual image of your body and your actual “interoceptive” experience. Body awareness helps us get some distance from our negative emotions and belief systems as well as contacting those of goodness. In discovering that we are not just our thoughts and images, we begin a journey to fullness as living, participating, sentient, embodied creatures. In the Beginning What follows is a brief review of humanity’s experience with embodiment and awareness. This admittedly speculative exploration is offered in the hope that it will better illustrate how the two important concepts of embodiment and awareness have been perceived and have developed over the ages. Biologically, we have evolved powerful movement systems designed for protection, hunting and avoiding being hunted. These automatic (instinctual) action systems —things that the body does to protect itself—were designed for rapid response when we come upon a snake or tiger. Without thinking we immediately react—escaping, fighting or freezing. For our earliest ancestors, physical readiness was a basic survival requirement. They had to be in the “here and now” every single moment of every single day. They were prepared to respond instantaneously and meaningfully to a few molecules of a novel scent or to the sound of a twig snapping in the distance. Simply put, they had to react from their guts. Without these compelling sensory prompts, our hunter-gatherer forbearers would not have lived to tell the tale. The degree to which they were “self-aware” of their instinctual responses remains, however, an unanswered question . Instincts, at their archaic roots, are compelled actions . They are movements that the body does or postural adjustments that prepare us for those actions. For this reason, physical sensations that guide these actions are the vehicle for direct knowledge of our instinctual selves.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Circuitry that controls freezing is not circuitry for fear. This egregious scientific misunderstanding, along with the phrase “fear learning,” has sown confusion for decades and turned what’s effectively an experiment on classical conditioning into an industry of fear. 4 6 The whole notion of fear learning is fraught with other problems. Rats in threatening situations do not always freeze. When you put them into a small box with tones and shocks arriving together at unpredictable times, rats indeed freeze, but in a larger enclosure, rats run away, unless they’re cornered, in which case they attack. If you restrain the rat during the tone (which shouldn’t matter, because the rat is going to freeze anyway), its heart rate goes down instead of up. Additionally, not all of these varied behaviors require the amygdala. To date, scientists have identified at least three alleged fear pathways in the rat brain, each associated with a specific behavior, all of them products of the mental inference fallacy. Finally, a simple behavior like freezing is supported by multiple circuits within a distributed network that is not specific to freezing or fear. 4 7 In a nutshell, you can’t study fear by shocking rats unless at the outset you have defined “fear” circularly as “the freezing response of a shocked rat.” Humans, like rats, act in various ways when threatened. We might freeze, flee, or attack. We might also crack jokes, faint, or ignore what’s going on. Such behaviors might be evoked by distinct circuitry in the brain that is shared among mammals, but they are not inherently emotional, and they’re not evidence that emotions have biological essences. Nevertheless, some scientists continue to write that they’ve isolated highly complex mental states in animals. Baby rats, for example, when separated from their mother after birth, make a high-pitched noise that sounds like crying. Some scientists inferred that the brain circuitry responsible for the crying must be the circuitry for distress. But these baby rats aren’t sad. They’re cold. The sound is just a byproduct as the baby rats try to regulate their body temperature—part of their body budget—a task normally done by their absent mothers. It has nothing to do with emotion. The mental inference fallacy strikes again. 4 8 From now on, any time that you read an article about animal emotion, watch for this pattern. If a scientist labels a behavior like freezing using a mental state word like “fear,” you should think, “Aha, the mental inference fallacy!” To be fair, it’s extremely hard for scientists to avoid the trap of mental inference. Grant agencies prefer to fund research that is directly relevant to humans. Scientists must also recognize that they are performing a mental inference in the first place, which is a nontrivial feat of introspection. And then they must be brave enough to face the criticism and scorn of their colleagues for swimming against the tide.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  dissever the grain (as being a thing impossible to be brought to pass, by reason it lay so confusedly scat- tered) but being astonied at the cruel command- ment of Venus, sat still and said nothing. Then the little pismire the ant, that dwelleth in the fields, knowing and taking pity of the great difficulty and labour of the consort of so great a god, and cursing the cruelness of so evil a mother, ran about nimbly hither and thither, and called to her all the ants of the country, saying: ‘I pray you, my friends, ye quick daughters of the ground the mother of all things, take mercy on this poor maid espoused to Cupid, who is in great danger of her person; I pray you help her with all diligence.’ Incontinently they came, the hosts of six-footed creatures one after another in waves, separating and dividing the grain, and after that they had put each kind of corn in order, they ran away again in all haste from her sight. * When night came, Venus returned home from the banquet well tippled with wine, smelling of balm, and all her body crowned with garlands of roses, who when she espied with what great diligence the work was done, began to say: ‘This is not the labour of thy hands, vile quean, but. rather of his that is amorous of thee to thy hurt and his.’ Then she gave her a morsel of brown bread, and went to sleep. In the mean season Cupid was closed fast in the most surest chamber of the house, partly because he should not hurt himself the more with wanton dalliance, and partly because he should not speak with his love. So was the night bitterly passed by these two lovers divided one from another beneath the same roof. But when Aurora was driving in through the morning sky, Venus called Psyche, and said; ‘Seest thou yonder forest that extendeth out 265 12 13 LUCIUS APULEIUS luenti ripisque longis attenditur, cuius imi frutices! vicinum fontem despiciunt? Oves ibi nitentes aurique colore? florentes incustodito pastu vagantur: inde de coma pretiosi velleris floccum mihi confestim quoquo modo quaesitum afferas censeo.'

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Another time, I wrote a Post-it note and asked for dryer sheets. I paid minor attention to the dust on the windowsills, swirls of lint and hairs caught between the floorboards. I wrote a Post-it note: “Sweep or tell me to sweep when I’m blacked out.” I forgot Ping Xi’s name, then remembered it. I passed the hallway to the locked door of the apartment and vaguely nodded at the idea of the lock, as though it might be just an idea, the door itself, just the notion of a door. “Plato”: chalk, chain, Hollywood, Hegel, carte postale, banana daiquiri, breezes, music, roads, horizons. I could feel the certainty of a reality leeching out of me like calcium from a bone. I was starving my mind into obliqueness. I felt less and less. Words came and I spoke them in my head, then nestled in on the sound of them, got lost in the music. “Ginger”: ale, smoke, China, satin, rose, blemish, treble, babka, fist. • • • ON FEBRUARY 19, I stared into the mirror. My lips were chapped but I was smiling. Two syllables chimed in my mind and I wrote them down on a Post-it for Ping Xi: “Lip balm.” “ChapStick”: strawberry, linoleum, pay scale, sundae, poodle. And then, another Post-it note: “Thank you.” • • • ON FEBRUARY 25, I could tell immediately that something was different. I awoke not sprawled on the mattress in the bedroom, but curled up under a towel on the floor in the northeast corner of the living room, where my desk used to be. I thought I smelled gas, and the association with fire alarmed me, so I got up and went to the stove before remembering that it was electric. Maybe, I thought, what I’d smelled was my own sweat. I relaxed. I opened the fridge, stood in the yellow light, and chewed my piece of pizza. My salivary glands were hesitant at first, but then they acquiesced, and the pizza tasted better than I’d remembered it. I pulled clean pajamas from the dryer and put them on in the hallway. I sniffed the air again and recognized the distinct tang of turpentine. It was coming from the bedroom. The bedroom door was locked. I knocked. “Hello?” I listened with my ear pressed against the door, but all I heard was my own shallow breathing, the blink of my eyes, my mouth filling with spit, the echo in my throat swallowing it down. I took my vitamins, but did not bathe. When I took the Infermiterol that day, I pictured Ping Xi’s paintings. They flashed into my mind like memories. They were all “sleeping nudes,” mussed beds and tangles of pale limbs and blond hair, blue shadows in the folds of the white sheets, sunsets reflected on the white wall backgrounds.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  A fake Christmas tree had been wedged into the corner, the top third lopped off and placed next to it in a milk crate. The main part of the tree was decorated with purple strands of tinsel and what looked like costume jewelry—fake pearl necklaces, gold and silver bangles, children’s rhinestone tiaras, baubley clip-on earrings. Her office smelled like iodine and sage. Where the unsittable fainting sofa had been there was now a large, Band-Aid–colored massage table. “I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please,” Dr. Tuttle said. “You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?” I leaned carefully against the bookshelf. “What do you use the massage table for?” I heard myself ask. “Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It’s an ancient form of healing— locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies.” “I see.” “And by surgery I mean metaphysical operations. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you’re interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it’s very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms— adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don’t worry. I’m not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you, anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it,” she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid’s at the doctor’s. “You really do look troubled. How are you sleeping these days?” “Like I said, I’ve been having some serious issues,” I began. “Don’t tell me, I know what you’re going to say,” Dr. Tuttle said. She picked a length of copper wire off her desk and put the tip to her cheek, poking in the soft flesh. Her skin looked suppler than I’d remembered it, and it struck me that Dr. Tuttle was probably younger than I had thought she was. She might only have been in her early forties. “It’s the Infermiterol. It didn’t work. Am I right?” “Not really . . .” “I know exactly what went wrong,” she said, and put the wire down. “The sample I gave you was the children’s dosage. That would only muddy up the waters, so to speak. The brain must cross a certain threshold before it can function abnormally. It’s like filling a bathtub. It means nothing to your downstairs neighbors until it’s overflowing.” “I was going to say that the Infermiterol—” “Because of leaks,” Dr. Tuttle clarified. “I get it. But I think the Infermiterol—” “Now just a moment while I pull your file.” She shuffled papers on her desk. “I haven’t seen you since December.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is, perhaps, the key to history, since 1ve are history, and since the tension of which I am speaking is so silent and so private, with effects so unforeseeable, and so public. In any case, the Americans' ladder is not Jacob's ladder, their pillow is not Jacob's pillow. Armed with this legacy, this testament, and this envelope which I had not yet opened, I went to France. November n, 1 948: rain, fatigue, panic, the absolute cer tain[)' of being dashed to death on the vindictive tooth of the Eiffel Tower, which we circled, it seemed to me, for hours. I do not remember feeling the remotest exhila ration. I had a few "friends" in Paris, and $40 in my pocket, and expected a little less from my friends than I did from the $40. I was wrong, I must tell you at once, as to my friends, who were far more present than I would have dared allow myself to hope-my first lesson, perhaps, in humility; perhaps the first opening of a certain door. For the people who were nice to me were very nice to me without, if you see what I mean, being nice: They forced me to recognize that they cared about me. This was a bewildering, a paralyzing, revelation, and I know that I was not very graceful . The Bronx, Brooklyn, Texas, Princeton, and Alabama accents stammered out a need and anguish like my own: If I were ever to grow up, ever, then I had to hear my accent in the accent of others, and to recognize that anguish was not a province which I had dis covered only yesterday, alone. On the other hand, I was right about the $40, which melted in a day, and there I was, in Paris, on my ass. My ass, mister, mine: and I was glad. In spite of every- EVERY GOOD- BYE AIN ' T GONE 777 thing-the cops, the concierges, the hotels, the alleys, the joints, eventually the hospital, finally the jail -1 was glad. If the demarcation line existed, then I had to be somewhat close to it, for I refused to believe that I could be so abject as to blame my trials, those crises which I myself perpetually pre cipitated, on my color. Furthermore, I could not dare to see that the question of the demarcation line was a false question and that I could hide behind it, paralyzed, vindictive, and guilty, for the rest of my lif e. It was not for this, however, that I had lef t a small girl crying on the top floor of a Harlem tenement.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (Yet he was not there. Here he was, in Paris, speaking the adopted language in which he also wrote his poetry.) Just what the specific relation of an artist to his culture says about that culture is a very pretty question. The culture which had produced Senghor seemed, on the fa ce of it, to have a greater coherence as regarded assumptions, traditions, cus toms, and beliefs than did the Western culture to which it stood in so problematical a relation. And this might very well mean that the culture represented by Senghor was healthier than the culture represented by the hall in which he spoke. But the leap to this conclusion, than which nothing would have seemed easier, was frustrated by the question of just what health is in relation to a culture. Senghor's culture, fo r ex ample, did not seem to need the lonely activity of the singular intelligence on which the cultural life-the moral life-of the West depends. And a really cohesive society, one of the at tributes, perhaps, of what is taken to be a "healthy" culture, has, generally, and, I suspect, necessarily, a much lower level of tolerance for the maverick, the dissenter, the man who steals the fire, than have societies in which, the common ground of belief having all but vanished, each man, in awful and brutal isolation, is for himself, to flower or to perish. Or, not impossibly, to make real and fr uitful again that vanished common ground, which, as I take it, is nothing more or less than the culture itself, endangered and rendered nearly inac cessible by the complexities it has, itself, inevitably created. Nothing is more undeniable than the fa ct that cultures 1 5 2 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME vanish, undergo crises; are, in any case, in a perpetual state of change and fermentation, being perpetually driven, God knows where, by fo rces within and without. And one of the results, surely, of the present tension between the society rep resented by Senghor and the society represented by the Salle Descartes was just this perceptible drop, during the last dec ade, of the Western level of tolerance. I wondered what this would mean-for Mrica, fo r us. I wondered just what effect the concept of art expressed by Senghor would have on that renaissance he had predicted and just what transformations this concept itself would undergo as it encountered the com plexities of the century into which it was moving with such speed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But even this is not the worst of it, since he is really dealing with two hierarchies, one white and one black, the latter modeled on the fo rmer. The higher he rises, the less is his journey worth, since (unless he is extremely energetic and anarchic, a genuinely "bad nigger" in the most positive sense of the term) all he can possibly find himself exposed to is the gri m emptiness of the white world-which does not live by the standards it uses to victimize him-and the even more ghastly emptiness of black people who wish they were white. Therefore, one "exceptional" Negro watches another "excep- 262 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME tiona!" :Negro in order to find out if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly fu nny the hoax has been. Alliances, in the great cocktail party of the white man's world, are fo rmed, almost purely, on this basis, fo r if both of you can laugh, you ha\'e a lot to laugh about. On the other hand, if only one of you can laugh, one of you, inevitably, is laughing at the other. In the case of my new-found friend, Andy, and I, we were able, luckily, to laugh together. We were both baffied by Richard, but still respectful and fo nd of him-we accepted fr om Richard pronouncements and attitudes which we would certainly never have accepted from each other, or from anyone else-at the time Richard returned from wherever he had been to film Natil'e Son. (In which, to our horror, later abundantly justified, he himself played Bigger Thomas.) He returned with a brainstorm, which he outlined to me one bright, sunny af ternoon, on the terrace ofthe Royal St. Germain. He wanted to do something to protect the rights of American Negroes in Paris; to fo rm, in effect, a kind of pressure group which would fo rce American businesses in Paris, and American gov ernment offices, to hire Negroes on a proportional basis. This seemed unrealistic to me. How, I asked him, in the first place, could one find out how many American Negroes there were in Paris? Richard quoted an approximate, semi official figure, which I do not remember, but I was still not satisfied. Of this number, how many were looking fo r jobs? Richard seemed to fe el that they spent most of their time being turned down by American bigots, but this was not really my impression. I am not sure I said this, though, fo r Richard often made me fe el that the word "frivolous" had been coined to describe me.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is, on the surface, remarkable that this book should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did enjoy; no more remarkable, however, than that it should have been compared, exuber antly, to Dostoevsky, though placed a shade below Dos Passos, Drciscr, and Steinbeck; and when the book is exam ined, its impact docs not seem remarkable at all, but becomes, on the contrary, perfectly logical and inevitable. We cannot, to begin with, divorce this book from the spe- MANY THOUSANDS GONE 2 5 cific social climate of that time: it was one of the last of those angry productions, encountered in the late twenties and all through the thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social structure of America. It was published one year before our entry into the last world war-which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of the WPA and the end of the New Deal and at a time when bread lines and soup kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in everyone's memory. The rigors of that unexpected ti me filled us not only with a gen uinely bewildered and despairing idealism-so that, because there at least was something to fight for, young men went off to die in Spain-but also with a genuinely bewildered self-consciousness. The Negro, who had been during the magnificent twenties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as one of the things we were most self-conscious about, our most oppressed minority. In the thirties, swallow ing Marx whole, we discovered the Worker and realized-1 should think with some relief-that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were one. This theorem-to which we shall return-seems now to leave rather too much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of the slogans of the "class struggle" and the gospel of the New Negro. As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle.