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 Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Dan 8:9–12 ; 2 Thess 2:3–10 ; Rev 13:4–10 ] 25 “And through his shrewdness He will cause deceit to succeed by his hand (influence); He will magnify himself in his mind, He will corrupt and destroy many who enjoy a false sense of security. He will also stand up and oppose the Prince of princes, But he will be broken, and that by no human hand [but by the hand of God]. [Rev 19:19 , 20 ] 26 “The vision of the evenings and the mornings Which has been told [to you] is true. But keep the vision a secret, For it has to do with many days in the now distant future.” 27 And I, Daniel, was exhausted and was sick for [several] days. Afterward I got up and continued with the king’s business; but I was astounded at the vision, and there was no one who could explain it. Daniel 9 Daniel’s Prayer for His People 1 I N THE first year of Darius the son of a Ahasuerus, of Median descent, who was made king over the realm of the b Chaldeans— 2 in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the books the number of years which, according to the word of the LORD to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the desolations [which had been] pronounced on Jerusalem would end; and it was seventy years. [Jer 25:11 , 12 ; 29:10 ] 3 So I directed my attention to the Lord God to seek Him by prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth and ashes. 4 I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed and said, “O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and extends lovingkindness toward those who love Him and keep His commandments, 5 we have sinned and committed wrong, and have behaved wickedly and have rebelled, turning away from Your commandments and ordinances. 6 “Further, we have not listened to and heeded Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. 7 “Righteousness belongs to You, O Lord, but to us confusion and open shame, as it is this day—to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are nearby and those who are far away, in all the countries to which You have driven them, because of the [treacherous] acts of unfaithfulness which they have committed against You. 8 “O LORD , to us belong confusion and open shame—to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers—because we have sinned against You. 9 “To the Lord our God belong mercy and lovingkindness and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him; 10 and we have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God by walking in His laws which He set before us through His servants the prophets.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and Whiteover," said Mrs. Bolton. "You've not seen the new works at Stacks Gate, opened after the War, have you Sir Clifford? Oh you must go one day, they're something quite new: great big chemical works at the pit-head, doesn't look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more money out of the chemical by-products than out of the coal--I forget what it is. And the grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! Of course it's brought a lot of riff-raff from all over the country. But a lot of Tevershall men got on there, and doin' well, a lot better than our own men. They say Tevershall's done, finished: only a question of a few more years, and it'll have to shut down. And New London'll go first. My word, won't it be funny, when there's no Tevershall pit working. It's bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it closes for good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl it was the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if he could get on here. Oh, there's been some money made in Tevershall. And now the men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out. Doesn't it sound awful! But of course there's a lot as'll never go till they have to. They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines. But they say that's what folks said when they had to give up the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the more machines, the more people, that's what it looks like! They say you can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks Gate, and that's funny, they're not three miles apart. But they say so. But everybody says it's a shame something can't be started, to keep the men going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls traipsing off to Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something to talk about if Tevershall Collieries took a new lease on life, after everybody saying they're finished, and a sinking ship, and the men ought to leave them like rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so much. Of course there was a boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made a trust of himself and got the money safe for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and the owners don't get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you! Why I always thought the Pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd have thought, when I was a girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood: yes, it's fair haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the pit-head, and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery. Why whatever we should do if Tevershall shut down--? it doesn't bear thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at strikes, and even then the fanwheels didn't stand, except when they fetched the ponies up. I'm sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year to year, you really don't."

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

  Formerly the cross of Christ had been to the carnal Messianic expectations and self-righteousness of Paul, as well as of other Jews, the greatest stumbling-block, as it was the height of folly to the worldly wisdom of the heathen mind.786 But the heavenly vision of the glory of Jesus at Damascus unlocked the key for the understanding of this mystery, and it was confirmed by the primitive apostolic tradition,787 and by his personal experience of the failure of the law and the power of the gospel to give peace to his troubled conscience. The death of Christ appeared to him now as the divinely appointed means for procuring righteousness. It is the device of infinite wisdom and love to reconcile the conflicting claims of justice and mercy whereby God could justify the sinner and yet remain just himself.788 Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us that we might become righteousness of God in him. He died in the place and for the benefit (uJpevr, periv) of sinners and enemies, so that his death has a universal significance. If one died for all, they all died.789 He offered his spotless and holy life as a ransom (luvtron) or price (timhv) for our sins, and thus effected our redemption (ajpoluvtrwsi"), as prisoners of war are redeemed by the payment of an equivalent. His death, therefore, is a vicarious sacrifice, an atonement, an expiation or propitiation iJlasmov", iJlasthvrion, sacrificium expiatorium) for the sins of the whole world, and secured full and final remission (a[fesi") and reconciliation between God and man (katallaghv). This the Mosaic law and sacrifices could not accomplish. They could only keep alive and deepen the sense of the necessity of an atonement. If righteousness came by the law, Christ’s death would be needless and fruitless. His death removes not only the guilt of sin, but it destroyed also its power and dominion. Hence the great stress Paul laid on the preaching of the cross (oJ lovgo" tou' staurou') in which alone he would glory.790 This rich doctrine of the atonement which pervades the Pauline Epistles is only a legitimate expansion of the word of Christ that he would give his life as a ransom for sinners and shed his blood for the remission of sins.

• From Vox (1992)

  115 then a farther-back shot showing that she was kneeling on the bed holding her hair out of the way of the camera and he was lying on his back, A B A B, and I could see the mixture of colors change on Emily's iris, and I could see it make these exact little adjustments. The miracle of sight. She had an expression of very alert frowning amused distaste. When that scene was over, I said, 'What do you think so far?' I just wanted to hear her voice. And she said, 'As it happens, I've seen this movie before, about a year ago.' Then we watched maybe three sex scenes silently. Maybe more. Once I asked some ques tion like 'Is that one of the counterfeiters?' And she said, 'Yes.' Otherwise we were totally silent, while these hard working Europeans struggled and jacked and sucked and moaned and came in English in front of us. The men came, anyway. It's still a rarity to see a woman really come on a video, as opposed to thrashing around. There was more of the dimensionless electronic Europop mu sic. After one giant come-shot Emily put her tea down and took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and smiled. I laughed with relief. I said, 'Is it as you remem bered it?' And she said, Tm a little chilly.' So I un- snapped the plastic cover of the blanket and unfolded this big acrylic plaid thing and put it over her, but I did it wrong, evidently, because she said, 'Could you turn it this way?' and she showed me how she wanted it. So I tucked her in with the fringe of the blanket running under her neck. Then I sat down again, focused on the

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  That cogito is never fully of the cultural world that it negotiates, no matter the narrowness of the ontological distance that separates that subject from its cultural predicates. The theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed “etc.” at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated “etc.” that so often occurs at the end of such lines? This is a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the supplément, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all. This illimitable et cetera, however, offers itself as a new departure for feminist political theorizing. If identity is asserted through a process of signification, if identity is always already signified, and yet continues to signify as it circulates within various interlocking discourses, then the question of agency is not to be answered through recourse to an “I” that preexists signification. In other words, the enabling conditions for an assertion of “I” are provided by the structure of signification, the rules that regulate the legitimate and illegitimate invocation of that pronoun, the practices that establish the terms of intelligibility by which that pronoun can circulate. Language is not an exterior medium or instrument into which I pour a self and from which I glean a reflection of that self. The Hegelian model of self-recognition that has been appropriated by Marx, Lukacs, and a variety of contemporary liberatory discourses presupposes a potential adequation between the “I” that confronts its world, including its language, as an object, and the “I” that finds itself as an object in that world. But the subject/object dichotomy, which here belongs to the tradition of Western epistemology, conditions the very problematic of identity that it seeks to solve. What discursive tradition establishes the “I” and its “Other” in an epistemological confrontation that subsequently decides where and how questions of knowability and agency are to be determined? What kinds of agency are foreclosed through the positing of an epistemological subject precisely because the rules and practices that govern the invocation of that subject and regulate its agency in advance are ruled out as sites of analysis and critical intervention? That the epistemological point of departure is in no sense inevitable is naively and pervasively confirmed by the mundane operations of ordinary language —widely documented within anthropology—that regard the subject/object dichotomy as a strange and contingent, if not violent, philosophical imposition. The language of appropriation, instrumentality, and distanciation germane to the epistemological mode also belong to a strategy of domination that pits the “I” against an “Other” and, once that separation is effected, creates an artificial set of questions about the knowability and recoverability of that Other.

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

  It is significant that the school of negative criticism has produced no learned commentary on John. All the recent commentators on the fourth Gospel (Lücke, Ewald, Lange, Hengstenberg, Luthardt, Meyer, Weiss, Alford, Wordsworth, Godet, Westcott, Milligan , Moulton, Plummer, etc.) favor its genuineness. The Difficulties of the Anti-Johannean Theory. The prevailing theory of the negative critics is this: They accept the Synoptic Gospels, with the exception of the miracles, as genuine history, but for this very reason they reject John; and they accept the Apocalypse as the genuine work of the apostle John, who is represented by the Synoptists as a Son of Thunder, and by Paul (Gal. 2) as one of the three pillars of conservative Jewish Christianity, but for this very reason they deny that he can have written the Gospel, which in style and spirit differs so widely from the Apocalypse. For this position they appeal to the fact that the Synoptists and the Apocalypse are equally well, and even better supported by internal and external evidence, and represent a tradition which is at least twenty years older. But what then becomes of the fourth Gospel? It is incredible that the real John should have falsified the history of his Master; consequently the Gospel which bears his name is a post-apostolic fiction, a religious poem, or a romance on the theme of the incarnate Logos. It is the Gospel of Christian Gnosticism, strongly influenced by the Alexandrian philosophy of Philo. Yet it is no fraud any more than other literary fictions. The unknown author dealt with the historical Jesus of the Synoptists, as Plato dealt with Socrates, making him simply the base for his own sublime speculations, and putting speeches into his mouth which he never uttered. Who was that Christian Plato? No critic can tell, or even conjecture, except Renan, who revived, as possible at least, the absurd view of the Alogi, that the Gnostic heretic, Cerinthus the enemy of John, wrote the fourth Gospel1092 Such a conjecture requires an extraordinary stretch of imagination and an amazing amount of credulity. The more sober among the critics suppose that the author was a highly gifted Ephesian disciple of John, who freely reproduced and modified his oral teaching after he was removed by death. But how could his name be utterly unknown, when the names of Polycarp and Papias and other disciples of John, far less important, have come down to as? "The great unknown" is a mystery indeed. Some critics, half in sympathy with Tübingen, are willing to admit that John himself wrote a part of the book, either the historic narratives or the discourses, but neither of these compromises will do: the book is a unit, and is either wholly genuine or wholly a fiction.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He hadn’t been paid in months, and besides, there were no new books to sell. Tonight he was wearing pocketless black trousers molded to his full buttocks. “Not bad, hunh?” he said, standing on tiptoe, sticking out his ass, hand on hip, and looking back over one shoulder like a wartime pinup. We piled into a car with some friends of his, all a few years older than I, and as we passed a policeman directing traffic, the driver lowered his window and shouted, “Love your hat, Tilly! ” “Hush, you’re a caution,” someone in the back seat said, “don’t upset Lily Law, she be bad , that girl.” In my middle-class way, I tried to show interest in my neighbor by asking him where he lived, what he did, but he peered right into my face and licked his lips slowly like a silent movie vamp. “Hey, it’s cute, this one, it’s real cute,” he announced to Morris in the front seat, pointing at me. “Like it?” Morris asked, bored. “You like anything in trousers, shameless hussy,” he added, stifling a tiny meow of a yawn with a fluttering palm. Morris’s hands, I noticed, were huge and ropey with veins, strangely ill-suited to the frivolous gestures he liked to sketch in. “Look, bitch,” my neighbor growled at Morris, “don’t get me started, or your mother will claw your little red eyes out—I’m on the rag tonight.” “Certainly,” Morris said, smartly turning around and deliberately staring at the other man’s crotch, “you’ve certainly been ragging something; I never saw a white woman pack such a big box, I don’t mind if you tuck in the odd hanky coyly stuffed just to provide a little front interest, don’t you know, but Mary you’ve pushed a double bed sheet up that cooze of yours—not that you feel anything down there anyway, stretched out as it! must! be !” he said, ending his aria on an upbeat. He snapped his fingers and turned away. “I’ll read you if you wreck my nerves, girl,” my neighbor said. Then he added a loud wailing “Oo-eeh!” just as Mahalia Jackson might have done after an all-out gospel hymn. We were all smiling. I was mute and ponderous beside my new companions. I assumed each bit of repartee had been coined on the spot. Only later did I recognize that the routines made up a repertory, a sort of folk wisdom common to “queens,” for hadn’t Morris recklessly announced, “Grab your tiaras, girls, we’re all royalty tonight, why I haven’t seen so many crowned heads since Westminster Abbey—” “I know you give head, Abbie, but the only crowns you’ve seen are on those few molars you’ve got left.” The speaker turned to me, nudged me in the ribs, indicated Morris, and said, “Can you fathom a slut pulling her teeth just to give a smoother hum job?” and then pulled his lips back over his own teeth to demonstrate.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We piled into a car with some friends of his, all a few years older than I, and as we passed a policeman directing traffic, the driver lowered his window and shouted, “Love your hat, Tilly!” “Hush, you’re a caution,” someone in the back seat said, “don’t upset Lily Law, she be bad, that girl.” In my middle-class way, I tried to show interest in my neighbor by asking him where he lived, what he did, but he peered right into my face and licked his lips slowly like a silent movie vamp. “Hey, it’s cute, this one, it’s real cute,” he announced to Morris in the front seat, pointing at me. “Like it?” Morris asked, bored. “You like anything in trousers, shameless hussy,” he added, stifling a tiny meow of a yawn with a fluttering palm. Morris’s hands, I noticed, were huge and ropey with veins, strangely ill-suited to the frivolous gestures he liked to sketch in. “Look, bitch,” my neighbor growled at Morris, “don’t get me started, or your mother will claw your little red eyes out—I’m on the rag tonight.” “Certainly,” Morris said, smartly turning around and deliberately staring at the other man’s crotch, “you’ve certainly been ragging something; I never saw a white woman pack such a big box, I don’t mind if you tuck in the odd hanky coyly stuffed just to provide a little front interest, don’t you know, but Mary you’ve pushed a double bed sheet up that cooze of yours—not that you feel anything down there anyway, stretched out as it! must! be!” he said, ending his aria on an upbeat. He snapped his fingers and turned away. “I’ll read you if you wreck my nerves, girl,” my neighbor said. Then he added a loud wailing “Oo-eeh!” just as Mahalia Jackson might have done after an all-out gospel hymn. We were all smiling. I was mute and ponderous beside my new companions. I assumed each bit of repartee had been coined on the spot. Only later did I recognize that the routines made up a repertory, a sort of folk wisdom common to “queens,” for hadn’t Morris recklessly announced, “Grab your tiaras, girls, we’re all royalty tonight, why I haven’t seen so many crowned heads since Westminster Abbey—” “I know you give head, Abbie, but the only crowns you’ve seen are on those few molars you’ve got left.” The speaker turned to me, nudged me in the ribs, indicated Morris, and said, “Can you fathom a slut pulling her teeth just to give a smoother hum job?” and then pulled his lips back over his own teeth to demonstrate. “She covers the waterfront, poor dentureless crone, looking for seafood trade.”

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  THE NEXT DAY MOM took Brian and me to Welch Elementary, near the outskirts of town. She marched confidently into the principal’s office with us in tow and informed him that he would have the pleasure of enrolling two of the brightest, most creative children in America in his school. The principal looked at Mom over his black-rimmed glasses but remained seated behind his desk. Mom explained that we’d left Phoenix in a teensy bit of a hurry, you know how that goes, and unfortunately, in all the commotion, she forgot to pack stuff like school records and birth certificates. “But you can take my word for it that Jeannette and Brian are exceptionally bright, even gifted.” She smiled at him. The principal looked at Brian and me, with our unwashed hair and our thin desert clothes. His face took on a sour, skeptical expression. He focused on me, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said something that sounded like “Wuts et tahm sebm?” “Excuse me?” I said. “Et tahm sebm!” he said louder. I was completely bewildered. I looked at Mom. “She doesn’t understand your accent,” Mom told the principal. He frowned. Mom turned to me. “He’s asking you what’s eight times seven.” “Oh!” I shouted. “Fifty-six! Eight times seven is fifty-six!” I started spouting out all sorts of mathematical equations. The principal looked at me blankly. “He can’t make out what you’re saying,” Mom told me. “Try to talk slowly.” The principal asked me a few more questions I couldn’t understand. With Mom translating, I gave answers that he couldn’t understand. Then he asked Brian some questions, and they couldn’t understand each other, either. The principal decided that Brian and I were both a bit slow and had speech impediments that made it difficult for others to understand us. He placed us both in special classes for students with learning disabilities. • • •

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  65 11. The Minor Prophets The Reluctant Prophet Even though the minor prophets are collected together because they share the genre of prophecy, this grouping might be downplaying some of the differences among them. Between the earliest and latest parts of the Book of the Twelve, both historical circumstances and prophecy itself have changed. And one of the minor prophets perhaps doesn’t fit even in an expansive sense of what a prophetic book might be—the book of Jonah. The first words of the book state, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai.” However, Jonah isn’t a prophetic book in basically any other sense. Jonah speaks exactly one sentence of prophecy in the entire narrative: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jon 3:4). And unlike every other prophet in the Bible, he doesn’t have anything at all to say to Israel itself. This story may be about a prophet—but it is a satire of prophecy. Jonah is a prophet who runs away from his calling, yet finds himself surrounded by people who seem more devoted to Yahweh than he is. On the boat that he first tries to escape on, all the other sailors are pagans, but they instantly recognize the authority of Yahweh, praying and even offering sacrifices. Even the fish that swallows Jonah seems to be more obedient than him, swallowing him and spewing him out at Yahweh’s command. When Jonah goes to Nineveh—the greatest city in the world—he hasn’t even gotten more than a third of the way across it before he proclaims his message, and instantly, “the people of Nineveh believed God.” The king of Nineveh hears it and immediately repents. Jonah has the easiest prophetic job in history, but it’s so easy that he doesn’t like it. Apparently, if he is to proclaim the imminent destruction of Nineveh, he wants Nineveh to be destroyed—not spared because they all repented. Here is the great comedy of the book: The prophetic role isn’t to tell the future but to change the present. Messages of future doom are meant to inspire contemporary change. Jonah does this perfectly—but he just wants to be a fortune teller. The seriousness with which the satirical book of Jonah is usually read is an indication of how people’s understanding of what the Bible should be has affected what they expect from it, how they engage with it, and what sorts of meaning they attach to it. Thus, perhaps “minor prophets” isn’t a 11. The Minor Prophets 66 perfect title for the collection, as at least Jonah isn’t a book of prophecy at all. However, the title Book of the Twelve is also somewhat misleading. It leaves the impression that these are the words of 12 individual prophets, which isn’t exactly right.

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  3. Genesis: Creation and the Flood 16 The Biblical Flood Story Speaking of Noah, the f lood story is so fixed in today’s collective cultural imagination that almost everyone can give the same basic details—the animals come in pairs, two by two, male and female. It rains for 40 days and 40 nights. Noah sends a dove; then, there’s a rainbow. All of those things are indeed in this story—but they’re not the only things in there. In the Bible, the story begins with God recognizing that humanity is wicked and deciding to kill them all, except for Noah (Gen. 6:5–8). Then, almost immediately, the story says the same thing again: The earth is corrupt, and God sees that it is and tells Noah that he’s decided to destroy it all (Gen. 6:11–13). God tells Noah to build an ark but also says that God will make a covenant with him. Noah just has to get into the ark—along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives—and take along one male and one female of every kind of animal to keep them alive. Noah does exactly that (Gen. 6:17–22). Then, something unexpected happens. God gives Noah instructions again, but they’re different this time. Now, Noah must take seven pairs of all clean animals, one pair of all unclean animals, and seven pairs of all birds. God says that it will rain for 40 days and 40 nights—and since Noah previously did what God told him to, he must now have to leave the ark and get more animals (Gen. 7:1–5). In the 600th year of Noah’s life, on the 17th day of the second month, the f lood begins; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens are opened. The waters rise and cover the mountains, and everything dies. Then, everything dies again, one verse later (Gen. 7:22–23). Next, the waters rise for 150 days—not 40 days and 40 nights, evidently— and God stops the fountains of the deep, the windows of the heavens, and the rain. The ark finally comes to land on Mount Ararat on the 17th day of the seventh month. Between the 17th day of the second month and the 17th day of the seventh month is 150 days. Now, the 40 days and nights don’t fit. But the next verse says, “At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark” (Gen. 8:6). Which 40 days? In any case, when Noah opens the window, you might think he’s sending his famous dove. But instead: “[He] sent out the raven: it went to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth” (Gen. 8:7). “Then he sent out a dove to see whether the waters had decreased” (Gen. 8:8). Why did he need the dove when he’d already sent the raven? 17 3. Genesis: Creation and the Flood

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  21 4. Exodus: From Egypt to Sinai The Biblical Exodus In Exodus 7:14, God says, “Pharaoh is stubborn; he refuses to let the people go.” He instructs Moses to tell Pharaoh the following script: “The Lord, the god of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, ‘Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness.’ But you have paid no heed until now” (7:16 ). I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood, and the fish in the Nile will die. The Nile will stink so that the Egyptians will find it impossible to drink the water of the Nile. (7:17–18) However, the next thing that appears is a different set of divine instructions that directly contradict those given in the last verses: The Lord said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron: Take your rod and hold your arm out over the waters of Egypt—its rivers, its canals, its ponds, all its bodies of water—that they may turn to blood; there shall be blood throughout the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and stone. (7:19) So, what happens? “Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord commanded” (7:20). Seemingly, they fulfill that second set of instructions, as Aaron is involved. In the next breath, “he lifted up the rod and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and all his courtiers, and all the water in the Nile was turned to blood” (7:20). But these actions fulfill the first set of instructions, with the striking of the Nile specifically. “The fish in the Nile died. The Nile stank so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile” (7:21)—still the first set of instructions. The next sentence is back to the second set of instructions, with the blood everywhere: “And there was blood throughout the land of Egypt” (7:21). Now, something else strange occurs. “The Egyptian magicians did the same with their spells” (7:22). How can the magicians turn the water to blood if the water is already blood? Apparently, the water turns to blood and then turns right back, giving the magicians an opportunity to do the same trick. That

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Modern college campuses are replete with gender warriors who specify whether they are cis-gender (meaning their emotional, psychological, physiological, and genetic genders match), nonconforming, or transgender. They may replace he and she with neutral pronouns such as ze, ne, ou, hir, they, or even it. The rejection of the “gender binary” can be truly radically liberating. At the same time, a rush to label a young person as “nonconforming” may risk unwittingly calcifying traditional categories. Consider the case of a male-to-female transgender first-grader whose family sued her Colorado school for forbidding her to use the girls’ bathroom: her parents said their first inkling that their son, the only boy in a set of triplets, was unusual came when he was five months old and reached for a pink blanket meant for one of his sisters. Later, he rejected a car he was given for Christmas, showed no interest in sports-themed clothing, and donned a princess dress rather than a fireman’s uniform in fantasy play. Five-month-olds don’t know pink from blue. And choosing tulle over tools? With all due respect to the family and the child, who may indeed be transgender, that hardly seems like “proof” of anything other than adult bias. Yet nearly every press report I read not only trotted out those anecdotes but placed them in the story’s lead. Even as I admired the child’s parents for supporting their daughter, that inflexible definition of masculinity—which would see a boy as actually female before accommodating his love for sparkly gowns—concerned me. Some of Amber’s reasons for questioning her gender identity were similarly retrograde: they included being more dominant in bed, standing up for herself, planning to pursue a career in business, and hating to cook. Nor was Amber the only young lesbian I met who wondered whether her clothing and attitudes meant she was actually male. Valentina, eighteen, the girl who called herself my “unicorn,” also spent her senior year of high school thinking she “must” be transgender. Growing up in a low-income, largely Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago, she shunned anything conventionally feminine: Barbies, pink, skirts, frills. Dressed in a flannel shirt and loose jeans, she told me that in middle school other girls would crawl into her lap to cuddle, calling her “Big Daddy” (she was broadly built) and ask advice about boys. By high school, she was scouring the Internet for clues as to her identity. “I wanted to know,” she said, “‘Am I gay?’ ‘Am I transgender?’” “Did you feel like you were in the wrong body?” I asked her. “No.” “Did you feel like you wanted to be a man?” “No,” she said again. “Then why did you think you might be transgender?”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Tonight he was wearing pocketless black trousers molded to his full buttocks. “Not bad, hunh?” he said, standing on tiptoe, sticking out his ass, hand on hip, and looking back over one shoulder like a wartime pinup. We piled into a car with some friends of his, all a few years older than I, and as we passed a policeman directing traffic, the driver lowered his window and shouted, “Love your hat, Tilly!” “Hush, you’re a caution,” someone in the back seat said, “don’t upset Lily Law, she be bad, that girl.” In my middle-class way, I tried to show interest in my neighbor by asking him where he lived, what he did, but he peered right into my face and licked his lips slowly like a silent movie vamp. “Hey, it’s cute, this one, it’s real cute,” he announced to Morris in the front seat, pointing at me. “Like it?” Morris asked, bored. “You like anything in trousers, shameless hussy,” he added, stifling a tiny meow of a yawn with a fluttering palm. Morris’s hands, I noticed, were huge and ropey with veins, strangely ill-suited to the frivolous gestures he liked to sketch in. “Look, bitch,” my neighbor growled at Morris, “don’t get me started, or your mother will claw your little red eyes out—I’m on the rag tonight.” “Certainly,” Morris said, smartly turning around and deliberately staring at the other man’s crotch, “you’ve certainly been ragging something; I never saw a white woman pack such a big box, I don’t mind if you tuck in the odd hanky coyly stuffed just to provide a little front interest, don’t you know, but Mary you’ve pushed a double bed sheet up that cooze of yours—not that you feel anything down there anyway, stretched out as it! must! be!” he said, ending his aria on an upbeat. He snapped his fingers and turned away. “I’ll read you if you wreck my nerves, girl,” my neighbor said. Then he added a loud wailing “Oo-eeh!” just as Mahalia Jackson might have done after an all-out gospel hymn. We were all smiling. I was mute and ponderous beside my new companions. I assumed each bit of repartee had been coined on the spot. Only later did I recognize that the routines made up a repertory, a sort of folk wisdom common to “queens,” for hadn’t Morris recklessly announced, “Grab your tiaras, girls, we’re all royalty tonight, why I haven’t seen so many crowned heads since Westminster Abbey—” “I know you give head, Abbie, but the only crowns you’ve seen are on those few molars you’ve got left.” The speaker turned to me, nudged me in the ribs, indicated Morris, and said, “Can you fathom a slut pulling her teeth just to give a smoother hum job?” and then pulled his lips back over his own teeth to demonstrate. “She covers the waterfront, poor dentureless crone, looking for seafood trade.” We stopped at a gay coffee shop.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Got off to look at the no longer existing windmills. Think of it, though. Oh yes, and even more important than all these … With Delteil we made a detour coming out of Spain and passed by that mountain where the last of the Albigensians had been walled in. And another name still: Nostradamus. Not only my talks with the French doctor, but my talks with the man and wife who maintained Michel Simon’s home in La Ciotât. They came from Nostradamus’ country. They communed with Petrarch. I’ll reel them off again, and twenty-one salutes to Waremme (of The Maurizius Case): Nostradamus, Cervantes, Ruysbroeck, El Greco, Rabelais, Proust, Da Vinci, Moses Maimonides, Shakespeare—and Old Friar John (Powys). And just a stone’s throw from Glastonbury—and all Arthur’s great realm around us … “the matter of Britain,” as they say…. Joey, I must get back to work. So long. Tootle-oo. Henry From Henry Miller to Alfred Perlés Dear Fred, It’s a strange thing but just a few days before I received your Third Letter to Larry I lay awake early one morning asking myself if all these books I have written (about my life, my suffering, my sins) were really as important, as necessary, as I once thought. I was reading them over from beyond the grave, as it were. I wasn’t thinking of them critically but rather as one does sometimes with his own life—of what use, of what good, to what end, and so on. And here is the strange conclusion I came up with: that God had answered my prayers and suffered me to become a writer, but, as the gods often do when responding to human pleas, my request had been answered only literally. What do I mean? I am not quite sure if I can tell you exactly, but it’s something like this…. I proved to my satisfaction that, like any other mortal, I too could write. But since I wasn’t really meant to be a writer all that was permitted me to give expression to was this business of writing and being a writer; in short, my own private struggles with this problem. My grief, in other words. Out of the lack I made my song. Very much as if a warrior, challenged to mortal combat and having no weapons, must first forge them himself. And in the process, one that takes all his life, the purpose of his labors gets forgotten or sidetracked. Sometimes I say to myself, quite seriously, I mean: “when will you begin to write?” Write like other writers do. Like Larry, for instance, who is definitely what is called “a born writer.” Or, to put it another way, like Larry who has respect and reverence for his tools, his material.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  alarmed me. Into the party burst a thin Chinese woman in her fifties, salt-and-pepper hair drawn back, black pants, black sunglasses, fingernails and lips unpainted. Everyone grew silent and uncomfortable. The newcomer spoke rapidly in a maddening whine; I couldn’t pick out a word in her dialect. After half an hour she stood and left, nodding at Kay and one of the men and ignoring the rest of us. “She’s a sort of princess. That’s Fukienese she’s speaking,” Kay said. Our party, discouraged, broke up. One of the men walked me partway home and said, “That woman doesn’t like Americans and she hates speaking English. She teaches Old High German—” “What!” “Yes, at Cornell, and she takes a bus all day and night just to come here to speak Fukienese to Kay for four hours. Then she turns around and goes back. She writes Kay and me. I’ll show you her letters. They’re very beautiful and literary. She’ll be watching college boys racing around the track and in three words she’ll make an allusion to a Han fu about swans skimming the old palace pond.... She lives in a mental China still. She arrives without warning.” “Was she upset to see me at the party?” “Maybe.” He smiled. “What a dialect! We say she speaks five languages, all with a Fukienese accent.” For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast between my happy Chinese friends, the plentiful table, the laughter and harvest-moon faces—and then the perfect stillness of everyone’s eyes lowered under the bright ceiling lamp while the visitor nattered on and on, half her royal face concealed behind sunglasses, hand cutting the air. Her rank or distress had intimidated everyone except Kay, who seemed proud to be singled out. Maybe I was studying Chinese in order to have precisely these fleeting contacts with even a remnant of a society so different from my fragmented and compartmentalized life. My university had twenty thousand students, which makes a big school but a small town. Despite the smallness, I was able to keep several different lives separate from one another—I hid the Chinese from my fraternity brothers, the brothers from the bohemians I was mingling with in the middle room of the student-union cafeteria, and all three from those hairy legs and hard penises I was meeting under cold thick marble partitions or thin metal ones. When Kay or Betty would flirt with me I’d blush, and that became a new joke with them: I was nicknamed “Your Holiness” and teased for being a puritan. “We’ve heard about the American puritans,” Kay said unsmilingly. “Thoreau,” she said, pronouncing the name as though she meant the Hebrew holy book, the Torah. Since I’d read so many books about heterosexual sex and was specially well informed about the mysteries of the clitoris, my frat brothers thought I was a secret cocksman.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Mark 3:22–27 ; Luke 11:14 , 15 ] 23 All the people wondered in amazement, and said, “Could this be the Son of David (the Messiah)?” 24 But the Pharisees heard it and said, “This man e casts out demons only by [the help of] Beelzebul (Satan) the prince of the demons.” 25 Knowing their thoughts Jesus said to them, “Any kingdom that is divided against itself is being laid waste; and no city or house divided against itself will [continue to] stand. 26 “If Satan casts out Satan [that is, his demons], he has become divided against himself and disunited; how then will his kingdom stand? 27 “If I cast out the demons by [the help of] Beelzebul (Satan), by whom do your sons drive them out? For this reason they will be your judges. 28 “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you [before you expected it]. 29 “Or how can anyone go into a strong man’s house and steal his property unless he first overpowers and ties up the strong man? Then he will ransack and rob his house. [Is 49:24 , 25 ; Mark 3:27 ] The Unpardonable Sin 30 “He who is not with Me [once and for all on My side] is against Me; and he who does not [unequivocally] gather with Me scatters. [Luke 9:50 ; 11:23 ] 31 “Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy [every evil, abusive, injurious speaking, or indignity against sacred things] will be forgiven people, but f blasphemy against the [Holy] Spirit will not be forgiven. 32 “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit [by attributing the miracles done by Me to Satan] will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. [Mark 3:29 ; Luke 12:10 ] Words Reveal Character 33 “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for the tree is recognized and judged by its fruit. 34 “You brood of vipers, how can you speak good things when you are evil? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. 35 “The good man, from his [inner] good treasure, brings out good things; and the evil man, from his [inner] evil treasure, brings out evil things. 36 “But I tell you, on the day of judgment people will have to give an accounting for every careless or useless word they speak.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Of what use the poems of death, the maxims and counsels of the sage ones, the codes and tablets of the law-givers, of what use leaders, thinkers, men of art, if the very elements that made up the fabric of life were incapable of being transformed? Only to one who has not yet found his way is it permitted to ask all the wrong questions, to tread all the wrong paths, to hope and pray for the destruction of all existent modes and forms. Puzzled and perplexed, yanked this way and that, muddled and befuddled, striving and cursing, sneering and jeering, small wonder that in the midst of a thought, a perfect jewel of a thought, I sometimes caught myself staring straight ahead, mind blank, like a chimpanzee in the act of mounting another chimpanzee. It was in this wise that Abel begot Bogul and Bogul begot Mogul. I was the last of the line, a dog of a Zobel with a bone between my jaws which I could neither chew nor grind, which I teased and worried, and spat on and shat on. Soon I would piss on it and bury it. And the name of the bone was Babel. A grand life, the literary life. Never would I have it better. Such tools! Such technic! How could anyone, unless he hugged me like a shadow, know the myriads of waste places I frequented in my search for ore? Or the varieties of birds that sang for me as I dug my pits and shafts? Or the cackling, chortling gnomes and elves who waited on me as I labored, who faithfully tickled my balls, rehearsed my lines, or revealed to me the mysteries hidden in pebbles, twigs, fleas, lice and pollen? Who could possibly know the confidences revealed by my idols who were ever sending me night messages, or the secret codes imparted to me whereby I learned to read between the lines, to correct false biographical data and make light of gnostic commentaries? Never was there a more solid terra firma beneath my feet than when grappling with this shifting, floating world created by the vandals of culture on whom I finally learned to turn my ass. And who, I ask, who but a “master of reality” could imagine that the first step into the world of creation must be accompanied with a loud, evil-smelling fart, as if experiencing for the first time the significance of shellfire? Advance always! The generals of literature sleep soundly in their cosy bunks. We, the hairy ones, do the fighting. From that trench which must be taken there is no returning. Get thee behind us, ye laureates of Satan! If it be cleavers we must fight with, let us use them to full advantage. Faugh a balla! Get those greasy ducks! Avanti, avanti! The battle is endless. It had no beginning, nor will it know an end. We who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity.

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

  Cooper also daringly “writ[es] her body” onto the pages of her own book.14 In one incident, she searched for a ladies room at a train station. When she found the bathroom, one door was marked “for ladies” and the other “for colored people.” This created a moment of cognitive and experiential dissonance for Cooper, who was left “wondering under which head I come.”15 Elizabeth Alexander reads this as a moment of textual resistance for Cooper, who is faced with a choice that will necessarily “eras[e] some crucial part of her identity.” The options presented to her “render her a literally impossible body in her time and space.”16 In this moment, “Cooper reminds her readers … that she lives and moves within a physical body with sensations and needs.”17 The discursive technologies of race that operate in the signs “for ladies” and “for colored” inherently constitute discursive and textual acts of misrecognition for Black women. The only way to achieve any recognition is to insert a body into the text that challenges the identities signified in the labels. The insertion of her body also demonstrates the ways in which public space was designed not only to render Black bodies as inferior, but Black female bodies as unrecognizable and unknowable in civic terms. Where Black women’s bodies had been inherently publicly knowable under the conditions of slavery, after freedom and the conferral of citizenship, Black women did not fully fit into the categories propagated under Jim Crow. Yet, Cooper’s colored and female body ontologically challenged the epistemological claims that those signs made. In other words, Cooper’s textually present Black female body demanded to be known, in the very ways the signs attempted to foreclose. She used representations of her body in A Voice to challenge the race-gendered logics of those signs, hoping in the process to expose the discursive logics of racism and sexism and also to transform those discourses at the same time. “By writing her body into the texts as she does,” Elizabeth Alexander reminds us, “Cooper forges textual space for the creation of the turn-of-the-century African-American female intellectual. … As such A Voice becomes a symbolic representation of the body of the African-American woman of letters newly created in the public sphere.”18

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

  The Negro Woman Intellectual as ProblemPonchitta Pierce’s Ebony article, which appeared just two years after Hedgeman’s book, provides compelling insight into how Black communities thought about intellectual Black women at the height of the Civil Rights era. First, the article is entitled “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual,” though it might just as easily have been titled “The Problem of the Negro Woman Intellectual.” In a late-twentieth-century remix to Du Bois, the magazine article essentially asked of Black women intellectuals, “How does it feel to be a problem?” The designation of Black women as intellectuals was so perplexing as to constitute a conceptual anomaly. By way of comparison, a content analysis of the rest of this special issue on women reveals that in the range of articles that profiled women in the arts, politics, and entertainment, this article is the only one in the issue that constructed its titular category and subject matter as “a problem.” Gwendolyn Brooks, interviewed for the article, asserted that though there were many Black women whom we might call “bright or brilliant, productive, effective, intelligent, creative, eminent, discerning, distinguished … the right to such adjectives [would not] automatically entitle them to the security also of the title, ‘intellectual.’ That is something else.”17 At face value, her final declaration that “intellectual” was “something else” effectively suggested that an intellectual is something else other than a Black woman—that no matter how many commendable traits a Black woman might possess, being an intellectual was a feat just beyond her reach. It is unsurprising then that Brooks excluded herself from the designation of “intellectual” as well. To read slightly against the grain of Brooks’s sentiment, I would suggest that there is also another moment of possibility in the space of the “something else.” I say this, not wholly in terms of a notion of the Other, but in terms of the cultural vernaculars by which the Southern Black communities of my youth might say to a young woman who was audacious, and unapologetically self-possessed, “Girl, you are something else!” To be an intellectual is to be “something else.” Black women are “something else!” It is that space of possibility, that unique Black women’s cultural conceptualization of the “something else” as a form of energized, audacious, vivifying engagement with the world, that can, if we let it, animate conceptions of the Black woman intellectual.