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 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  But more than that, even if every dream were well explained by the hypothesis of a double, and could not be explained otherwise, it would remain a question why men have attempted to explain them. Dreams undoubtedly constitute the matter of a possible problem. But we pass by problems every day which we do not raise, and of which we have no suspicion until some circumstance makes us feel the necessity of raising them. Even when the taste for pure speculation is aroused, reflection is far from raising all the problems to which it could eventually apply itself; only those attract it which present a particular interest. Especially, when it is a question of facts which always take place in the same manner, habit easily numbs curiosity, and we do not even dream of questioning them. To shake off this torpor, it is necessary that practical exigencies, or at least a very pressing theoretical interest, stimulate our attention and turn it in this direction. That is why, at every moment of history, there have been so many things that we have not tried to understand, without even being conscious of our renunciation. Up until very recent times, it was believed that the sun was only a few feet in diameter. There is something incomprehensible in the statement that a luminous disc of such slight dimensions could illuminate the world: yet for centuries men never thought of resolving this contradiction. The fact of heredity has been known for a long time, but it is very recently that the attempt has been made to formulate its theory. Certain beliefs were even admitted which rendered it wholly unintelligible: thus in many Australian societies of which we shall have occasion to speak, the child is not physiologically the offspring of its parents.[108] This intellectual laziness is necessarily at its maximum among the primitive peoples. These weak beings, who have so much trouble in maintaining life against all the forces which assail it, have no means for supporting any luxury in the way of speculation. They do not reflect except when they are driven to it. Now it is difficult to see what could have led them to make dreams the theme of their meditations. What does the dream amount to in our lives? How little is the place it holds, especially because of the very vague impressions it leaves in the memory, and of the rapidity with which it is effaced from remembrance, and consequently, how surprising it is that a man of so rudimentary an intelligence should have expended such efforts to find its explanation! Of the two existences which he successively leads, that of the day and that of the night, it is the first which should interest him the most. Is it not strange that the second should have so captivated his attention that he made it the basis of a whole system of complicated ideas destined to have so profound an influence upon his thought and conduct?

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  In order to give a semblance of intelligibility to this duality, so strange for us, the primitive has invented myths which, it is true, explain nothing and only shift the difficulty, but which, by shifting it, seem at least to lessen the logical scandal. With slight variations of detail, all are constructed on the same plan: their object is to establish genealogical connections between the man and the totemic animal, making the one a relative of the other. By this common origin, which, by the way, is represented in various manners, they believe that they account for their common nature. The Narrinyeri, for example, have imagined that certain of the first men had the power of transforming themselves into beasts.[390] Other Australian societies place at the beginning of humanity either strange animals from which the men were descended in some unknown way,[391] or mixed beings, half-way between the two kingdoms,[392] or else unformed creatures, hardly representable, deprived of all determined organs, and even of all definite members, and the different parts of whose bodies were hardly outlined.[393] Mythical powers, sometimes conceived under the form of animals, then intervened and made men out of these ambiguous and innumerable beings which Spencer and Gillen say represent "stages in the transformation of animals and plants into human beings."[394] These transformations are represented to us under the form of violent and, as it were, surgical operations. It is under the blows of an axe or, if the operator is a bird, blows of the beak, that the human individual was carved out of this shapeless mass, his members separated from each other, his mouth opened and his nostrils pierced.[395] Analogous legends are found in America, except that owing to the more highly developed mentality of these peoples, the representations which they employ do not contain confusions so troublesome for the mind. Sometimes it is a legendary personage who, by an act of his power, metamorphosed the animal who gives its name to the clan into a man.[396] Sometimes the myth attempts to explain how, by a series of nearly natural events and a sort of spontaneous evolution, the animal transformed himself little by little, and finally took a human form.[397]

• From Another Country (1962)

  The veins in the nose were thickening and darkening; and, sometimes, as now, when Lorenzo looked straight before him, the eyes were more baffled and infinitely lonelier than those of a child. And at such moments Belle watched him, too, sympathy struggling to overcome the relentless vacuity in her face. And Harold seemed hooded then, like a great bird watching from a tree. “I’d love to go back to Spain,” said Lorenzo. “Do you know Spain?” asked Vivaldo. “He used to live there,” Belle said. “He always talks about Spain when we get high. We were supposed to go this summer.” She bent her head over her cocktail glass, disappearing for a moment, like some unprecedented turtle, behind the citadel of her hair. “Are we going to go, baby?” Lorenzo spread his hands, helplessly. “If we can get enough bread, we’ll go.” “It shouldn’t cost much to get to Spain,” Harold said. “And you can live there for almost nothing.” “It’s a wonderful place,” said Lorenzo. “I lived in Barcelona, on a fellowship, for over a year. And I traveled all over Spain. You know, I think they’re the grooviest people in the world, the sweetest cats I ever met, I met in Spain. That’s right. They’ll do anything for you, baby, lend you their shirts, tell you the time, show you the ropes—” “Lend you their sisters,” Harold laughed. “No, man, they love their sisters—” “But hate their mothers?” “No, man, they love them, too. Like they never heard of Freud.” Harold laughed. “They’ll take you home and feed you, they’ll share anything they’ve got with you and they’ll be hurt if you don’t take it.” “Mothers, sisters, or brothers,” Harold said. “Take them away. Open up that window and let that foul air out.” Lorenzo ignored this, looking around the table and nodding gravely. “That’s the truth, men, they’re great people.” “What about Franco?” Belle asked. She seemed rather proud to know that Franco existed. “Oh, Franco’s an asshole, he doesn’t count.” “Bullshit he doesn’t count,” cried Harold, “you think all those uniforms that we help Franco pay for are walking around Spain just for kicks? You think they don’t have real bullets in those guns? Let me tell you, dad, those cats are for real, they shoot people!” “Well. That doesn’t have anything to do with the people,” said Lorenzo. “Yeah. But I bet you wouldn’t like to be a Spaniard,” Harold said. “I’m sick of all this jazz about the happy Spanish peasant,” Vivaldo said.

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

  In fact, pseudohermaphrodites, with distinct characteristics of both sexes, are not terribly rare. (What is called true hermaphroditism, or intersex, is very rare; true hermaphrodites don’t simply have physical signs of both men and women. They have unique sexual glands, gonads mixed from male and female material, and their genitalia are an honest merging, an amorphous phase between the genders.) It doesn’t matter much which of the myriad possible gene mutations or enzyme defects is responsible—not unless it’s you caught up in such a bad biological pun. There are hermaphrodites with male genitalia, but ovaries instead of testicles. Others have female genitalia, but testes instead of ovaries; they appear to be girls, only to become boys at puberty, to the enormous chagrin of all concerned. There are people with an ovary on one side and a testis on the other, and sometimes both the ovary and the testis work at the same time, a kind of salmagundi of stimulation, fraught with bewilderment for the poor body pulled hither and thither by hormones fighting for the right to meld the flesh. What else makes me female? I can lose my breasts, my vagina, even my delectably female clitoris through surgery or disease. I would grieve, but I don’t think my womanliness depends on these anatomical markers. I can dilute and transmute these same markers with male hormones. Will I still be a woman? This is getting closer to real change, because the hormones affect much that isn’t objective as well as what is: mental states, emotions, desires. Gradually male hormones would erode the structure of femaleness, my female skeleton, and I would be transformed into something new, the same way steroid users, castrati, and transsexuals are transformed.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Millions have lived unnatural and perverted lives, and still do. And all this because we know no better. With all our science and technology we are going about in a state of spiritual ignorance so profound we don’t even know it. 6Noah and the FloodThe great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions. WILL DURANT F rom here on we can offer some proof that these Bible stories are parallels, not sequents. We must present more of them, however, before this becomes self-evident. Noah is given as the tenth from Adam, hence subsequent, and as we think of Adam as the first human being, Noah must be farther up on the evolutionary side. This is not so. Noah is just another Adam and his story another Creation myth. In this one we find the violence and “war in heaven,” space, the Priest saw fit to exclude from his. The “Deluge” was not a destruction of the world but its creation. Chronologically, Noah is eons prior to the Adam of the Garden, and contemporaneous with the Creator of the first chapter. That he was not a human being is obvious from the Ethiopian Book of Enoch . According to this source, Noah was transfigured at birth, the light of his body illuminating the whole house—the planetary entity. So here again we have that first “light shining in darkness.” Immediately thereafter he rose and talked to God—for the simple reason that he was God. Lamech, his father, beholding this, was astonished, and hurried to Methuselah, the grandfather, to find out its portent. But Methuselah was also mystified and so he went to his father, Enoch, and Enoch told him it meant that the wonder child would become the Savior of the race during a subsequent Deluge. This Deluge, said Enoch, would be the consequence of adultery between divine and mortal beings. And this is where the scriptural account of Noah begins. In words that have puzzled the race for over two thousand years it reports this divine miscegenation thus: 1. And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2. That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. 4. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. These “sons of God” are the spiritual forces of the third involutionary plane, and the “daughters of men,” generic, the material elements on the plane below, that is, prephysical matter. The spiritual came in unto the material and became material.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  In due time he was picked up by his mother—and Moses was returned to his. In like manner the Greek god Perseus was shut up in a chest and cast into the sea at the command of King Acrisius. On the shores of Seriphus he was found and raised by Dictys, as was Moses by Thermuthis, and Thermuthis was the name of the serpent sacred to Isis, the earth mother. This is the same serpent as that of Eden, namely, the life-force, and this is the serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness, the lower planes in Evolution. Similar tales were told of Romulus of Rome, Mithra of Persia, and even Alexander of Greece. Of Alexander it was said that he crossed the Pamphylian Sea miraculously. Menander wrote of it thus: Have I to cross where seas indignant roll? The sea retires and there I march. Incapable, like us, of distinguishing mythology from history, Strabo tried to explain this on natural grounds—low water in the winter season; and Josephus, no more enlightened, used it to convince the Greeks of the miracle of the Red Sea. The Hebrews had many stories about Moses besides those found in the canon, and they reveal much. From them we learn that, as with Noah, the whole house was filled with light when Moses was born. This, however, was not the same light; it is that second “light shining in darkness,” the first emanation of the primeval world. We learn also that there was a “war in heaven” fought over Moses similar to that described in Revelation. This is from Apocryphal sources, but a hint of it is found in canonical Jude, the ninth verse: “Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation.” Now why should these cosmic powers fight over the corpse of a man? Can any priest or Bible student tell us why? He cannot, but we can. The fight was between Involution and Evolution over possession of the earth, here called Moses. After this battle, Metatron (Enoch) appeared and conducted the spirit of Moses, the life force, up to heaven, the higher planes, again. On the way he passed through seven of them, theoretical, and there saw the angels (energies) of each, from those in the first that “controlled the waters standing in line” to those of the last and highest plane. He was also permitted to inspect hell, and there he saw the damned, ranging all the way from murderers to those who did not fast on Yom Kippur. It does not say which was the worse. The earlier Bibles say that Moses, when he came down from the mount, had horns on his head—as Michelangelo portrays him. The authors of the King James Version, believing this to be an error, made it read “the skin of his face shone,” thus hiding the key to Moses.

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

  Pat Califia sees S/M the same way Sade saw all of sex, as unavoidably political. She knows that the wider world of S/M practitioners has for some time been promoting a more hygienic image of itself, as a “safe, sane, and consensual” sexual practice, a motto designed to make the rest of the world relax. Since rough sex by its nature is outside the realm of the norm, when any part of it becomes “normal,” a new wall gives way. The nature of some people’s sexual desire is to be outside the wall, to always go a little further than what is allowed, rebel a little more. Says Califia, “I think there is an indigestible core of S/M activity that people who don’t do it are always going to find repellent.” There will be if she has her way. Sadomasochism is a kind of dressing up, a putting on of fantasy costume to create a fantasy world. We can also put on each other’s costumes, to enter our fantasy of each other’s worlds. Transvestism, or cross-dressing, seems like a deep existential expression one day and a silly game the next. Certainly what we call drag has a thousand meanings and can be stretched to include everything from Halloween and Carnival to Joyce’s love of frilly underwear on his Nora. Drag queens are history’s common, foolish perverts; cross-dressing has always been a psychologically complicated business. I’ve never cross-dressed in a traditional sense—I’ve never tried to pass as a man, though the politics attract. Cross-dressing women are bitches, ball-busters, dykes. (When I was born in the 1950s, it was still illegal in places for women not to be wearing at least three items of “women’s” clothing at a time.) For years, though, I had a strong interest in a kind of drag. The many phases of fashion and image that each of us puts on and takes off over the years between adolescence and adult maturity are all forms of drag, and what I mean by “drag” in this context is only a transition from one mode of dressing, one attempt to discover who I was, to another. For several years, off and on, I liked to see if I could look like a drag queen, as though I were a man being a woman. Sometimes it meant being the dark Vampirella with bloodred lips; sometimes it meant being the overwrought permed housewife. But it never worked. I’m a woman, not one of the girls. My old friend Don and I were walking along Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco on a sunny cold day, when I asked him to describe the drag queens he knew. He said, “Auntie Helen is twisted. Lola is sad, used up. Co’lean Bleach isn’t sad. She’s a stain-resistant co-dependent.” Snorting laughter. He is Co’lean Bleach himself. “But what does that mean?” “It means she’s a survivor. Everything is just water off her back.”

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

  As it happened, there were students at my college who would have been delighted to take my education in hand, because St. Anne’s was probably the most politically minded of all the five women’s colleges. This was, of course, the great period of student unrest. In January, while I was preparing to leave my convent, the Czech student Jan Palach had publicly burned himself to death to protest Soviet occupation, and in Spain student disturbances had led to the imposition of martial law. In April, left-wing students at Cornell University in New York State staged a three-day sit-in to draw attention to their outdated curriculum, while at Harvard, three hundred students occupied the campus administration building and were forcibly removed by the police. Oxford was also aflame with revolutionary enthusiasm. But the ringleaders looked absolutely terrifying to me—unapproachable in their righteous rage. I would as soon have approached a charging bull as expose my political naïveté to them. Almost every Saturday afternoon, I watched in bewilderment as crowds of students gathered on the college lawn, carrying placards emblazoned with slogans directed against the government, the university authorities, the syllabus, and something mysteriously called “the system.” They seemed furious about everything. I heard astonishing reports of violent meetings in the English Faculty Library, where undergraduates screamed abuse at the dons. They demanded that the formidable linguistic requirements of the course be scrapped, that the syllabus include contemporary literature (it currently stopped at 1900), and that the study of Anglo-Saxon be abolished. To me, who had fallen passionately in love with Old English literature, this rage was incomprehensible. When I heard some of my fellow students at St. Anne’s inveighing against the tyranny of the dons, I gazed at them nonplussed. After the draconian atmosphere of the convent, the mildly liberal, laissez-faire atmosphere of St. Anne’s seemed like paradise to me. These kids didn’t know what tyranny was! But then I remembered my last painful year in the convent, when I had been the rebel, and had argued relentlessly with my superior about the rule. I had also been full of rage, constantly frustrated by the convent “establishment” and passionately eager for change. Perhaps I was not quite so different from my contemporaries, after all. We had just been fighting in different wars.

• From Another Country (1962)

  It was his first sexual encounter with a male in many years, and his very first sexual encounter with a friend. He associated the act with the humiliation and the debasement of one male by another, the inferior male of less importance than the crumpled, cast-off handkerchief; but he did not feel this way toward Eric; and therefore he did not know what he felt. This tormented self-consciousness caused Vivaldo to fear that their moment might, after all, come to nothing. He did not want this to happen, he knew his need to be too great, and they had come too far, and Eric had risked too much. He was afraid of what might happen if they failed. Yet, his lust remained, and rose, chafing within and battering against the labyrinth of his bewilderment; his lust was unaccustomedly arrogant and cruel and irresponsible, and yet there was mingled in it a deep and incomprehensible tenderness: he did not want to cause Eric pain. The physical pain he had sometimes brought to vanished, phantom girls had been necessary for them, he had been unlocking, for them, the door to life; but he was now involved in another mystery, at once blacker and more pure. He tried to will himself back into his adolescence, grasping Eric’s strange body and stroking that strange sex. At the same time, he tried to think of a woman. (But he did not want to think of Ida.) And they lay together in this antique attitude, the hand of each on the sex of the other, and with their limbs entangled, and Eric’s breath trembling against Vivaldo’s chest. This childish and trustful tremor returned to Vivaldo a sense of his own power. He held Eric very tightly and covered Eric’s body with his own, as though he were shielding him from the falling heavens. But it was also as though he were, at the same instant, being shielded—by Eric’s love. It was strangely and insistently double-edged, it was like making love in the midst of mirrors, or it was like death by drowning. But it was also like music, the highest, sweetest, loneliest reeds, and it was like the rain. He kissed Eric again and again, wondering how they would finally come together.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “Netsex, Tinysex, virtual sex—however you name it, in real-life reality it’s nothing more than a 900-line encounter stripped of even the vestigial physicality of the voice,” Dibbell told me in an email. “And yet, as many a wide-eyed newbie can tell you, it’s possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDS has to offer. What happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true.” While this particular incident was disturbing and strange, it also spoke of something fascinating and weirdly compelling—a different way of sharing intimacy born from an emerging technology. This erotic frontier represented something so curious and compelling that it drew in a new round of adopters who sensed there was more available in this medium than disturbed men bent on hurting and repulsing other players. Netsex was pulling people further into this new technology. “I guess I had been on BBSs and what have you, that was the extent of my forays,” said Buffy Childerhose. Childerhose, now a journalist and documentary filmmaker, was in university at the end of the 1980s, when MUDding really exploded. “I had read the classic ‘Rape in Cyberspace’ and went, ‘How the fuck is this even possible? How can you be assaulted? I have to go to these sites.’” Childerhose learned how to use a modem, how to telnet from one computer to another, how to navigate the uncooperative tools of cyberspace travel, so that she could understand what netsex was. Her journey had nothing to do with the multibillion-dollar porn industry—it was just one individual exploring a new realm that was available for free. Childerhose was not alone. Thousands of people, all over North America, Europe and Asia, were logging on for the first time to explore a new kind of sex, passion and intimacy. She was part of a wave of new users who continued to drive demand for bandwidth, computers and peripherals long before they had anything resembling mainstream appeal. “I felt like the first person with a fax machine. I didn’t know anyone else who was online, and everything was so crude,” Childerhose said. “It was pre-World Wide Web. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. I certainly didn’t know what was going on.” On the MUDS and MOOS, technology and sexual intimacy were deeply entangled. You could not get comfortable with one without being at home with the other. Childerhose grew proficient with both. “I was really more interested in the social interaction and the investment that you would have in your avatar that would allow for you to feel violated. But as soon as you get into those arenas and if you have a female-gendered name, very quickly people are going to turn the conversations to a more sort of salacious kind of thing.”

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

  11No one has ever duplicated the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson. They weren’t the first to study the physiology of sexual intercourse and orgasm, but they were the first, and the only, people to publish such a narrowly focused and detailed study of it for the lay person. No one else has tried, as far as I know, and I doubt anyone could anymore, funding being a continuing problem in the field of sexology, and funding for explicit research the hardest to find. Human Sexual Response sold out its first printing in three days, but most people today can’t describe what the book was about, exactly, or how the research was done. For good reason. At the time Masters was quoted as saying of the book’s incredibly turgid prose, “Every effort was made to make this book as pedantic and obtuse as possible and, may I say in all modesty, I think we succeeded admirably.” Masters and Johnson originally used prostitutes in their research—women “regarded as knowledgeable, cooperative, and available for study”—because they presumed “more conservative” populations wouldn’t participate in their research. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, unlike Alfred Kinsey, weren’t interested in social behavior. They were interested in the precise anatomy and physiology of sex—the minute structures of the genitalia, and especially, what happened to the genitalia in sexual arousal and orgasm. This required the researchers to observe people actually having sex and having orgasms, and, reasonably enough, prostitutes came to mind. And many did participate—giving “invaluable” tips on sexual response and technique. It wasn’t long before the researchers’ efforts to find more conservative people paid off. Eventually 382 women, aged eighteen to seventy-eight years, and 312 men, aged twenty-one to eighty-nine, participated. They gave such blunt reasons for participating as anxiety over sexual performance, “the opportunity for anonymous relief of sexual tension,” the chance to revive a marriage, and a unique opportunity to earn some extra cash. Clearly, the “conservative” population was full of surprises. Masters and Johnson claimed all their subjects felt the study was ultimately beneficial to their sex lives. Most of the women, who were studied longer and in more depth than men, listed two primary motives: money and a safe outlet for regular sex. The heart of the study involved observations of intercourse and masturbation, the last involving a kind of high-tech, electrically powered recording dildo, allegedly nicknamed Ulysses. “The penises are plastic and were developed with the same optics as plate glass. Cold-light illumination allows observation and recording without distortion.… Orientation to this equipment obviously was necessary.…” Human Sexual Response is a tough read, a textbook on a complex subject most of us know little about, written in the most technically aloof language possible. But now and then a little poetry seeps through the arid academic paragraphs; now and then a little irony peeks out, perhaps not always unintentionally. Vaginal lubrication before intercourse is called “mounting readiness.” The erect penis exhibits its “full, tense demand.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The complexity of a virtual world interface is compounded by ambiguity over what the objective of the medium is. Someone who cannot program a VCR still can easily grasp what the machine is meant to do. The purpose of a virtual world, though—particularly of the kind with no puzzles or quests—is less immediately discernible. These worlds are full of strange customs, foreign jargon and local shibboleths, and a visitor can wander around lost, bored or frustrated indefinitely. As with real-life exotic travel, the safest and most practical course of action is to enlist an experienced travel companion—someone who can translate the local dialect, who knows where the points of interest can be found and who knows how to stay out of trouble. That’s how I ended up exploring a sunlit shopping plaza with a computer programmer named Randal Oulton. Oulton had agreed to show me some of the ways that sex and erotica are actively shaping the technology of virtual worlds. His tour would take us into some pretty strange territory, dealing both with some fairly serious kink and with some issues of love and other emotions that are on some level more disturbing than sexuality on its own could ever be. Considerate guide that he was, though, he eased me in slowly, giving me a chance to acclimatize. We were exploring one of the most famous virtual worlds, called Second Life. Like LambdaMOO, Second Life is a place for socializing and sex, rather than swords and sorcery. Unlike LambdaMOO, Second Life is also a place to do business. As we walked around the plaza, we passed a rug shop, greeting card store, art gallery, offices for an AIDS education charity and even a retail outfit that sells diagnostic scanners and other medical equipment. (An MRI machine sold for about $6 U.S.) We didn’t have all day, so we opted to fly instead of walk. (One of the perks of virtual worlds is that you can mess with physics.) With a little jump, we were airborne. Before we entered any shops, we flew up to the mall roof, where Oulton wanted to show off his latest acquisition: a lighter-than-air ship. He uses it for hosting parties in the sky to promote his Second Life businesses. “I make sure that I socialize and network, because it’s a big part of branding and marketing,” he said. “I sponsor a lot of club openings with prizes, money, that kind of stuff. I make sure my name is out there, and that it’s a trusted name.” He’s doing okay, too. He owns the mall we were flying around. It sits on an island he bought for about $700 U.S. He rents out many of the shop spaces and runs several of his own retail businesses here. “Sadly, airships are banned in this mall, so I will take it away before anyone notices,” he said before causing it to wink out of existence. “Let’s do another tour of the mall.”

• From Wild (2012)

  I squatted and grasped its frame more robustly and tried to lift it again. Again it did not move. Not even an inch. I tried to lift it with both hands, with my legs braced beneath me, while attempting to wrap it in a bear hug, with all of my breath and my might and my will, with everything in me. And still it would not come. It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do. I sat down on the floor beside it and pondered my situation. How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles over rugged mountains and waterless deserts if I couldn’t even budge it an inch in an air-conditioned motel room? The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to. I’d simply thought that if I added up all the things I needed in order to go backpacking, it would equal a weight that I could carry. The people at REI, it was true, had mentioned weight rather often in their soliloquies, but I hadn’t paid much attention. It seemed there had been more important questions to consider. Like whether a face muff allowed the hood to be cinched snug without obstructing my breathing. I thought about what I might take out of my pack, but each item struck me as either so obviously needed or so in-case-of-emergency necessary that I didn’t dare remove it. I would have to try to carry the pack as it was. I scooted over the carpet and situated myself on my rump right in front of my pack, wove my arms through the shoulder straps, and clipped the sternum strap across my chest. I took a deep breath and began rocking back and forth to gain momentum, until finally I hurled myself forward with everything in me and got myself onto my hands and knees. My backpack was no longer on the floor. It was officially attached to me. It still seemed like a Volkswagen Beetle, only now it seemed like a Volkswagen Beetle that was parked on my back. I stayed there for a few moments, trying to get my balance. Slowly, I worked my feet beneath me while simultaneously scaling the metal cooling unit with my hands until I was vertical enough that I could do a dead lift. The frame of the pack squeaked as I rose, it too straining from the tremendous weight. By the time I was standing—which is to say, hunching in a remotely upright position—I was holding the vented metal panel that I’d accidentally ripped loose from the cooling unit in my efforts.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  It is no coincidence that the drive to innovate, the impetus to deliver new products that make the medium easier and cheaper to use, comes from the world of erotica and sexuality. Virtual worlds are a living example of a technology still in transition, still dependent on sexual applications for the marketing innovations that will ultimately make them ready for the mainstream. The cycle is not yet complete—both the technology and the user base are still developing—but every new penis, every invisible sexual furniture product, every orgy ball speeds the evolution of virtual worlds into a mainstream medium. When Oulton and I were nearing the end of our Second Life tour, we started talking about another aspect of virtual sex— making friends, falling in love and sharing emotional intimacy. Even after you’ve accepted that people can get turned on by the virtual actions of distant lovers, it might still be difficult to comprehend concepts like getting married and settling down in a virtual world. There are even those who raise families. Here’s how having a Second Life family works: If a couple wish to have a child, one of the partners agrees to become pregnant. You buy a “pregnant suit” for the gestation, with options for slow growth or instant bulge. Either way, that avatar is pregnant. Then you get to what Oulton calls “the controversial bit.” “There are people who want to be children in SL. They want to be child avatars,” he said. “There’s a big movement against them, but they are fighting to protect themselves. They’re saying, ‘What’s wrong with it? We’re not doing anything sexual. You might be thinking that way, but we’re just wanting to be children.’ And usually what you do is you get one of those persons to agree to become the child that is born. That person agrees to become part of your family.” This type of agreement raises many questions: What if any of the three players involved decides they don’t want to play any more? What if the couple splits? What happens to the estate? Possessions in the game carry real dollar values, so how do you divide property? When does it become worth it to involve lawyers? Such questions speak to the issue of exactly how far virtual worlds can extend into real life. The barriers to the expansion of virtual worlds—technological limitations and difficulty of use—are disappearing quickly. When these hurdles become sufficiently small, mainstream users will be sucked into virtual realms in as great numbers as they have been to email, surfing, Facebook and so on. Before virtual worlds hit the mainstream, they will also likely be scrubbed clean of any vestigial sexual overtones. As with today’s mainstream Internet, sex will still be a presence, but it will be once again pushed to the margins, compartmentalized in ways that won’t make the rest of the virtual world feel uncomfortable.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The reason the mystery still exists is because we lack the philosophic ability to collate them. The following pages will at least illustrate the collative process. The mystery and the tyranny exist only because there is still so much that cannot be explained without their hypothesis—a supernatural Creator and source of moral good. As Richard Carrington said in A Million Years of Man: “. . . scientists who have so often attempted to eliminate a creative God from the universe in the interest of truth, are now finding that they can ultimately explain nothing at all unless they are prepared to put him back.” This is the dilemma that must be disposed of. Could we find a natural, reason-satisfying cause that does explain, instead of the reason-offending cause religion offers, we could then say with Monsieur LaPlace, “We have no need of that hypothesis.” This would mean the end of superstition and the beginning of enlightenment. We have been told that the tall tales of the Bible are “revealed truth.” What we need now is to have that “revealed truth” revealed, for as yet it never has been. What follows are but scraps of the required knowledge. Premise: A Genetic Cosmo-ConceptionSay first, of God above or man below, What can we reason but from what we know?1 ALEXANDER POPE A world is a vast and complex thing, its life and economy far too teleological to be accidental. Its cause can be none other than an intelligence of some kind, and since all nature bears witness to such an element, the intelligent cosmologist will begin with intelligence. What this intelligence is constitutes the cosmic mystery. Concerning this, there need be no mystery. This intelligence has been staring us in the face since the dawn of life; it is all around us everywhere but because of false theologies we cannot see it. It is here in this world, not heaven above, and science is well aware of it. The mystery still persists because the scientist has never seen its cosmic significance. The key to Causation is in the effect. This, for us, is the known world, and as the Zohar says: “If you would know the unknown, observe carefully the known.” So let us observe the known and by a process of extrapolation apply what we know about the known to the unknown. By this process we will arrive at a Cause in keeping with the effect—the opposite of the priestly method. This should result in two prerequisites of the future: correct orientation of the mind with Reality, and a new dimension of consciousness . CausationThe seeds of things, the primal germs we teach, Whence all creation around us came to be. Lucretius In observing the known, we might “consider the lilies, how they grow” but wheat is better. There may be in a field of wheat as many stocks as there are stars (visible) in the heavens, but there is no collective creator and governor over them.

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

  Calvin was claimed by both schools. He must be classed rather with the Supralapsarians, like Beza, Gomarus, Twysse, and Emmons. He saw the inconsistency of exempting from the divine foreordination the most important event in history, which involved the whole race in ruin. "It is not absurd," he says, "to assert that God not only foresaw, but also foreordained the fall of Adam and the ruin of his posterity." He expressly rejects the distinction between permission (permissio) and volition (voluntas) in God, who cannot permit what he does not will. "What reason," he asks, "shall we assign for God’s permitting the destruction of the impious, but because it is his will? It is not probable that man procured his own destruction by the mere permission, and without any appointment of God. As though God had not determined what he would choose to be the condition of the chief of his creatures. I shall not hesitate, therefore, to confess with Augustin, ’that the will of God is the necessity of things, and what he has willed will necessarily come to pass; as those things are really about to happen which he has foreseen."830 But while his inexorable logic pointed to this abyss, his moral and religious sense shrunk from the last logical inference of making God the author of sin; for this would be blasphemous, and involve the absurdity that God abhors and justly punishes what he himself decreed. He attributes to Adam the freedom of choice, by which he might have obtained eternal life, but he wilfully disobeyed.831 Hence his significant phrase: "Man falls, God’s providence so ordaining it; yet he falls by his own guilt."832 Here we have supralapsarian logic combined with ethical logic. He adds, however, that we do not know the reason why Providence so ordained it, and that it is better for us to contemplate the guilt of man than to search after the bidden predestination of God. "There is," he says, "a learned ignorance of things which it is neither permitted nor lawful to know, and avidity of knowledge is a species of madness." Here is, notwithstanding this wholesome caution, the crucial point where the rigorous logic of Calvin and Augustin breaks down, or where the moral logic triumphs over intellectual logic. To admit that God is the author of sin would destroy his holiness, and overthrow the foundation of morality and religion. This would not be Calvinism, but fatalism and pantheism. The most rigorous predestinarian is driven to the alternative of choosing between logic and morality. Augustin and Calvin could not hesitate for a moment. Again and again, Calvin calls it blasphemy to make God the author of sin, and he abhorred sin as much as any man ever did. It is an established fact that the severest Calvinists have always been the strictest moralists.833 Infant Salvation and Damnation.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Then there is mere , the sea. If then she sinned whose sin was it? The word Eve is but the latter part of the word Yahveh (heve), the Creative Principle. As with all the rest we have nothing new here. In the Hindu Book of Prophecies the first woman is called Heva, and the Babylonian name is similar. To the Tahitians it is Ivi. Thus, like Adam, Eve is not a personal name but a planetary symbol. 21. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them. Together Adam and Eve are the naked earth, which must be covered with vegetation and an aura. And here we will quote from a book many thousands of years older than the Bible, the Book of Dzyan , stanza I. “Cease thy complaints. Thy seven skins are yet on thee. Thou art not ready.” This is the earth entity complaining about its involutionary garments, aura. “After great throes she cast off her old three (mental, astral, and etheric) and put on her seven skins (evolutionary) and stood in her first one (physical matter).” These are Adam’s and Eve’s “coats of skin,” seven theoretically, but at that time physical only. Later we will come to a misunderstanding of them as absurd as that of the rib. 22. And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, iest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 23. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. “As one of us.” Modern Jews and Christians should ponder well this reference to other gods. Here we repeat, by learning of them, the mental darkness of monotheism might be dispelled, The earth now dressed in its evolutionary garments has become as it was in Involution. But it does not know moral good and evil. The good and evil of scriptural mythology is that between spirit and matter. This the Life Principle now has learned; it has eaten of “the tree of knowledge,” matter, the source of knowledge. The meaning of the fear that Adam would also lay hold of “the tree of life and live forever” is the very opposite of our common belief. The “tree of life” is the Life Principle asleep in matter, and the fear is that its Adam would remain there and refuse to go out and eat of “the tree of Knowledge,” biologic experience. This Life Principle is the genetic, neither moral nor self-conscious, and had Adam eaten of this (remained like it) epigenetic man would never have been. It was because of this, not sin, the Lord God drove Adam from the Garden. The plan was that Adam should go out, and once out the Law God saw to it that he did not return.

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

  But a few days later, when I went to my first party, I was not so sure. Yet again, when I walked into the murky, smoke-filled room, the noise almost knocked me sideways. The parties I had attended before the convent had been sedate, elderly affairs. Under the benign but hawklike gaze of our elders, we had lurched around the room in pairs, trying to match our faltering steps to the polite strains of waltzes and quicksteps—bored, I had to admit, almost to stupefaction. But nobody seemed bored here, I noted as I groped my way uncertainly to a corner where I had spotted Jane with her boyfriend, Mark, and accepted a glass of wine. I sipped it gratefully, hoping it might have some anesthetic effect, as I stared, dazed, at the scene before me. The room was as dark as an underground cavern, the gloom relieved periodically by flickering lights that transformed us all into granite-hued hags. Jane’s skin looked blanched, her lips black. On the other side of the room, I could see Pat and Fiona, their pretty, fresh faces also drained of color, their animated expressions curiously at variance with their corpselike pallor. “You look stunned.” Mark, a tall, solemn young man with the regular good looks of a male model, bent toward me solicitously. He had to shout above the din of a jangled crashing that I was trying to identify as music. Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed, and beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse. “No. No, not at all,” I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any virgin martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. “Who are the singers?” With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double take. “The Beatles, of course!” Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: “You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?”

• From Little Women (1868)

  By-and-by, when you've got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels," said Amy, who took a strictly practical view of the subject. "Well," said Jo, laughing, "if my people are 'philosophical and metaphysical', it isn't my fault, for I know nothing about such things, except what I hear father say, sometimes. If I've got some of his wise ideas jumbled up with my romance, so much the better for me. Now, Beth, what do you say?" "I should so like to see it printed soon," was all Beth said, and smiled in saying it. But there was an unconscious emphasis on the last word, and a wistful look in the eyes that never lost their childlike candor, which chilled Jo's heart for a minute with a forboding fear, and decided her to make her little venture 'soon'. So, with Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her first-born on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre. In the hope of pleasing everyone, she took everyone's advice, and like the old man and his donkey in the fable suited nobody. Her father liked the metaphysical streak which had unconsciously got into it, so that was allowed to remain though she had her doubts about it. Her mother thought that there was a trifle too much description. Out, therefore it came, and with it many necessary links in the story. Meg admired the tragedy, so Jo piled up the agony to suit her, while Amy objected to the fun, and, with the best intentions in life, Jo quenched the spritly scenes which relieved the somber character of the story. Then, to complicate the ruin, she cut it down one third, and confidingly sent the poor little romance, like a picked robin, out into the big, busy world to try its fate. Well, it was printed, and she got three hundred dollars for it, likewise plenty of praise and blame, both so much greater than she expected that she was thrown into a state of bewilderment from which it took her some time to recover. "You said, Mother, that criticism would help me. But how can it, when it's so contradictory that I don't know whether I've written a promising book or broken all the ten commandments?" cried poor Jo, turning over a heap of notices, the perusal of which filled her with pride and joy one minute, wrath and dismay the next. "This man says, 'An exquisite book, full of truth, beauty, and earnestness.' 'All is sweet, pure, and healthy.'" continued the perplexed authoress. "The next, 'The theory of the book is bad, full of morbid fancies, spiritualistic ideas, and unnatural characters.' Now, as I had no theory of any kind, don't believe in Spiritualism, and copied my characters from life, I don't see how this critic can be right.

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

  What makes us men and women? A little chromosome, a spurt of chemical here and there, an idea, a hope, a holy terror. All of this begs the question, which I am reluctantly getting to, after all. You can look at bodies, at male bodies and female bodies, and see how different they are—and how much the same, how tiny and irrelevant are the things that separate us. Our bodies are combinations of extensions and folds and little more, and we can see sex as the mere slipping of one body part into and through and over another. Even a simple kiss can be devastatingly intimate viewed that way, and intercourse numbingly mundane. Why do the folds and extensions matter so? Why has so much of human history been a history of sex—of uterine envy and castration fear and homicidal jealousy, taboos and sacrifice and obsessive symphonies of passion? So much so that the poor infant in the cradle needs a set of nicely defined folds and extensions right from the start. The shape of its little hairless crotch means ever so much. And still I don’t know what a woman is, or a man. Gender isn’t genitals, hormones, or chromosomes; attraction and desire isn’t based simply on the shape of things. I find myself thinking again and again that I can’t even know what sex is, let alone what it means to me, until I know what I am, what a woman is, what that means. But I can’t know, and I think that’s just one of the little lies I tell myself about sex. In a vital way gender has nothing to do with sex and sex has nothing to do with gender. Sex is far, far more than the fitting of genitals and hormones together, and gender is what it is without sex at all. Identity isn’t a wholly fixed thing. If we can call into question all the forms and signs of gender, then perhaps there is no such thing as gender. Gender is all illusion. We create this gestalt that makes gender possible; we make each other men and women. I’m sitting outside a coffee shop, watching: There goes ponytail, crew cut, miniskirt, black-belted raincoat, linen suit, like names or stories; there goes gold chain, knit vest, T-shirt, all names, all stories. Presentation and its etheric body, presentation, is always with us. Everywhere I turn the world drips with message and meaning, hidden agendas and outspoken purpose, rules and hopes and massive uncertainty. There is such fun in it, and such fear. We are all dressed up with no place to go.