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 Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  The figure in front of me, which was not a person and had no identifiable characteristics, was, all the same, a presence. Neither of us said anything, but again I felt perfectly safe. Then this figure, presence, whatever-it-was handed me a sword. Or rather I found myself reaching out my left hand and a sword was placed in it. An honest-to-god sword with a carved handle and a glinting silver blade almost as long as I was tall. As soon as I held the sword in my hand, the scene changed. The figure/presence was gone and I was standing all alone, sword in hand, in what seemed to be a tiny village, a collection of one-storey buildings with thatched roofs. I noticed that “I” was still female and dressed in a sort of tunic and skirt, and that my hair was darker than my normal colour and cut in a chin-length bob. And then it was over. My eyes were still open and everything evaporated. The light, the vision, the feeling of holding a sword in my hand. All gone. I was lying again on my bed, in my dark little cave, with my dog at my feet and what I can only imagine was a fairly stupid look on my face. “Huh,” I thought. “That was beyond weird.” I lay there, stock still, for a few minutes to see if anything else would happen, but nothing did. I replayed the scene over in my head a few times, my eyes searching what I could see of the ceiling and walls for remnants of what the light must have left behind. It had been so thick I couldn’t believe it could disappear completely without leaving some trace. But there was nothing there. I lay awake for quite a while after that, adrenalized by the surprise of what had just happened, confused, and not a little bit baffled. The next day happened to be my day off, so after breakfast and a long walk with Patches I hopped on a bus and made the journey across town to ostensibly run some errands. If I’d had more courage I would have admitted to myself that my true destination was Michael’s apartment. When I had made my way there, he was as happy to see me as ever. As we chatted about whatever else was going on that day, I worked up the courage to tell him what had happened to me. In the morning light, while Patches and I had strolled the quiet streets of our neighbourhood, I had re-examined the experience of the night before. It seemed no less real then, but I did have some misgivings about seeming crazy if I shared it with anyone (as I do now, almost twenty years later, while I write this). I delayed telling him and continued putting it off until we were almost getting ready to put our coats on and go out and have something to eat for lunch.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The truth will set you free, free from the ancient curse a diabolical priesthood put upon you. The Life Principle has now taken its first step out of matter and so we read: 1. And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 2. This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you (Chap. 12). Not “the first month of the year,” but the first epoch in Evolution, the etheric plane and plant kingdom. This month is now the month of Nisan, and the twenty-first of it is the birthday of Moses. Thus does ignorance reduce the sublime to the ridiculous. In the New Testament this sublime process is again reduced to one man and his birthday. 37. And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses (the treasure city, earth) to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children. 38. And a mixed multitude went up also with them . . . 40. Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years (4 + 3+0 = 7). Thirty more than God foretold Abraham. But what of that; in Creation, “a thousand years is but a day.” Jacob brought but seventy people into Egypt, and now according to Numbers 1:45-47, the Israelite army alone numbered 603,550. This was exclusive of women, children, and the Levites who were not numbered. This would mean a nation of between three and four million. What amazing fecundity! For man, yes, but not for the Life Principle. This is the monadic host emerging from the earth, Cronos disgorging his children, and Phoenix rising from its own ashes. A hint of this is contained in the next chapter: 19. And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you (Chap. 13). Joseph’s bones are Moses’ bones and therefore he took them with him. They are also Adam’s bones, out of which Eve, Mother Earth, was made. 17. And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines (matter), although that was near; for God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt: (He was also afraid Adam would return and “live forever.”) 18. But God led the people about, through the way of the wilderness of the Red sea: and the children of Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Egypt. “Eastward from Eden” again, through the first part of the evolutionary wilderness. 20. And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness.

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

  This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly colored William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the Oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantel-piece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to bare essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. All were a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people, and to material objects if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow. Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life. My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social, and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the fifties, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties, and girls were clad in demure twin sets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanor of these young people was even more startling. They had long, flowing hair instead of the tidy, repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged, and often eccentric—flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely Eastern robes.

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

  Perversion. The normal. Confession. Release. I have five photos. Each shows two people making love on a couch in essentially the same position. In one a man is penetrating a woman, who lies below him; her legs are embracing him, and you can just see his penis as he enters her vagina. The second shows a man and a woman as well; in this one the man is lying down and the woman straddles him; you can just see his penis entering her vagina from below. The next shows two men, one on his back, his legs embracing the other, who lies upon him, and you can just see his penis as he enters the man’s anus. The fourth picture shows two women, one lying and embracing the other with her legs; you can just see a dildo strapped around the waist of the woman on top, entering the vagina of the woman lying down. In the fifth picture, a man lies down with his legs around a woman; the woman, who leans over him tenderly, wears a dildo, and you can just see where the dildo enters his anus, as she penetrates him. When I lay these five pictures side by side upon a table, two things above all strike me. (No, to be honest, three things—because first of all, they arouse me. That’s the coloring of what follows.) My first thought is, What’s all the excitement about? Almost every element in all five of these photos is the same. Almost nothing is different—only small details of composition, small blebs of flesh protruding here, receding there. Each shows tenderness; the viewer sees the gentle hand reaching for a cheek, the eyes half closed in pleasure, the tension and relaxation of careful movement. But usually the focus—and the fuss—is on what is different. We pay so much attention, seem to care so very much, which blebs protrude and recede, who is above and who below, which orifice is full and which empty. This is my second thought, my secret thought. Of these five images, I could be in four. There is nothing to stop me, nothing at all but my own desire, my willingness to enter the image. To be the pervert of my own perverted self.

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

  Murray Davis, in his book Smut, rather neatly delineates the limits of socially acceptable sex by defining its unacceptable forms. His list begins “Sex Through Distance” (as in voyeurism and porn), “Sex Through Pain and Provocation,” “Sex With Things” (or people treated as things), “With Beasts or Gods” (or people treated as beasts or gods), “With Two Few and Too Many Others,” “With Wrong Sense Receptors” (such as the mouth or anus), “Within Ingroups” (like families or people of the same gender), “With Outgroups” (like people too different in age, race, class, or religion), and ends with sex “Involving Subjugation and Domination.” Looked at this way, it becomes a daunting task first to find an allowable sexual partner and second, to avoid doing the wrong thing—wanting the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing (“Oh, master!”). Perversity, like obscenity, is a relative condition; we define it for ourselves. Joyce, in his Catholic confusion, certainly believed himself to be a pervert—a pervert because of what he desired, and because he couldn’t stop trying to get it. He hated his desire’s drive as much as its content. (And again and again, he blamed Nora for that drive.) The word perversion is so insidious and sly; it sounds rich and oily on the tongue. One likes saying it out loud. But it means only what we don’t respond to ourselves; a perversion is whatever we can’t enjoy. Everyone, everywhere, considers something outside the pale; phobias can be latent just like desires. Last year I was a guest on a radio talk show. The topic was pornography, but the agenda, it turned out, was titillation. I was not surprised; it’s surprisingly difficult for otherwise hard-hitting interviewers to make sense about sex, to see beyond their own blinders, to even acknowledge their blinders. “What about perversions?” he asked me in the middle of a discussion about the regulation of adult bookstores. “Isn’t there something wrong with that?” “What do you mean by ‘perverted’?” I asked. “Define the term.” “Well,” he said, and, “Well, you know.” “Tell me what you think is perverted—or, better yet, tell me what is not perverted. What’s normal sex?” And he said, “Well, I guess, a man and a woman having intercourse.” “Do you mean gay people are perverted?” I asked, and he cut to a commercial, and after the commercial he ended the interview. Because he is a liberal, after all, and he would never say he thought gays were perverted; I doubt if he knows he believes that at least a little. But the question betrayed him, the very notion of perversion betrays us. If he’d been willing, I would have asked him where he drew his other lines, his other boundaries. Was bondage all right? Was it all right with a silk handkerchief but not with chains? Was anal intercourse perverted? Was oral sex, leather play, dressing up?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  (I have to say, as I spring around this way, that I can’t understand how real autobiographers like Maurice Baring or Robert Graves do it. How are they able to move so smoothly and so casually from a to b to c? I’m humbled by the difficulty of presenting one’s life truly without seeming to be a proponent of overfamiliar nonlinear orthodoxies. It isn’t that I think my disorder so far is in any way swanky or artistic; it’s that when I try to be a responsible memoirist and arrange my experiences in their proper places on a timeline, my interest in them dies and they altogether refuse to allow themselves to be told. I find that I have to submit to every anecdotal temptation just as it arises, regardless of temporal priority, in order for it, for me, to flower adequately into words.) So: chronofugation. The summer after fifth grade I used to go down the clothes-strewn stairs to the basement (the basement stairway was our dirty-clothes hamper) and spend major portions of the afternoon observing my family’s sheets and towels and clothes toil and spin. There was a safety interlock, a hinged inward-swinging tab, that cut the motor if the lid was opened during the spin cycle, but it was a simple matter to disable it: I just jammed it open with a pen. I stood at the washing machine for many hours, refining my appreciation of centrifugal force. At its peak speed, the basket of a clothes-washer turns at something like six hundred revolutions per minute. Towels, which are ordinarily the very soul of magnanimous absorbency,are at six hundred r.p.m. compressed into loutish, wedge-shaped chunks of raw textility, apotheoses of waddedness, their folds so conclusively superimposed, and their thousands of gently torqued turf-tassels so expunged, or exsponged, of reserve capacity, that I feel, after the last steady pints of blue-gray water have pulsed from the exit hose and the loud tick from within the machine signals some final disengagement of its transmission, and the spinning slows and stops, as if I am tossing boneless hams or (in the case of washcloths) little steaks into the dryer, rather than potential exhibits in a fabric-softener testimonial. Often the spun goods display on removal a pattern of raised dots, where the fabric has vainly tried to pour itself out of the holes in the spinning basket in the wake of the water it has just reluctantly released.

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

  The male orgasm has always seemed to me to burst almost from nowhere, to be infinitely more ready and willing than my own—and to peak and race away into a vanishing point where all desire, all interest in things sexual, disappears. Richard Rhodes describes his effort to hold back ejaculation by reciting the Gettysburg Address, trying to resist what Masters and Johnson called the “sense of ejaculatory inevitability.” But Lincoln was no help under the pressure; Lincoln, like everything else, kept turning into sex. “The onanistic spill or paternal birth ectasy of ‘Our fathers brought forth upon this continent’ was particularly treacherous to navigate. Y_____became ‘this continent,’ her breasts mountains …” I find it rather more important to keep my mind on the complex process of buildup, rather than off; Lincoln would distract me in an instant, would inevitably lead into rumination and memory, drawing the frustrated energy away. Male orgasm seems easy to me. Men can leap into sex, make a big slimy mess of everything, and leap out, or go right to sleep, or get up for a little television. Women are dismissed as fish, while men shoot snotty come all about and forget to get a towel. It hardly seems fair. But life isn’t fair. When women described their orgasms to Masters and Johnson, it was as though they were describing a completely different event. What is a driving, linear sensation to men begins in women “with a sensation of suspension or stoppage.” This moment of timelessness is followed immediately by pleasure ranging in intensity “from mild to shock level,” accompanied by various strange and sometimes distracting feelings—“bearing down,” “pelvic throbbing,” this last growing until it is “one with a sense of the pulse or heartbeat.” Howie Gordon told me another anecdote about his early days in porn, and his first scene with an actress he’d never met before. “We started, took about fifteen minutes, whoosh, everything was perfect. After we came—after I came—I said, ‘Do you want to come?’ And she said, ‘Are you kidding? In front of all these people?’ ” My own orgasm is fragile, elusive, and commanding, and subject to other people’s agendas, however old or worn. Ghosts inhabit my orgasm; long-gone spirits speak. My orgasms are hard won and often emotionally disruptive, fading only with reluctance, sometimes refusing to completely go away. Why, when the clitoris has more nerve endings in a much smaller space then the penis, is the female orgasm so much trickier to achieve? Why don’t I go off like a rocket? I can try to explain the evolution of male orgasms as the inevitable result of hunters trying to procreate as fast as possible when fertile females are hard to find and predators wait behind every rock. But that explanation doesn’t satisfy me, not one way or the other. Patience is what’s needed, and sometimes patience is exactly what I haven’t got.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  How to explain—“trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours? The presumptuousness of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live. Becoming, Deleuze and Guattari called this flight: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular. A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward, turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last. It’s painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn’t really read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.

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

  As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial mating dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally in documentaries or news-reels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, as she stares with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honor during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either. Looking back, I can see that during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine, or Zimbabwe and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of home is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world—inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos—has literally come to an end. Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my home in the convent of my own free will and was not languishing in a camp. But I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the sixties world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction and not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St. Anne’s where we bought newspapers and sweets.

• 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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I became the most appalling falconry bore. On wet afternoons after school my mum’d be writing up news stories for the local paper – court reports, local fêtes, planning committees – fingers hammering away on her typewriter in the dining room. There’d be a pack of Benson & Hedges on the table, a cup of tea, a shorthand notebook, and a daughter standing next to her reeling off imperfectly remembered sentences from nineteenth-century falconry books. It seemed crucial to explain to my mother that while dog leather was the best leather for hawk-leashes, it was almost impossible to get these days. That the problem with merlins was that they’re prone to carry their quarry; and also did she know that saker falcons, hailing from desert areas, are unreliable performers in English climatic conditions? Lining up another yellow piece of copy paper, fiddling with the carbons so they didn’t slip, she’d nod and agree, drag on her cigarette, and tell me how interesting it all was in tones that avoided dismissiveness with extraordinary facility. Soon I was an expert on falconry the way the carpet salesman who used to come into the bookshop where I once worked was an expert on the Greco-Persian Wars. Shy, crumpled, middle-aged, and carrying with him the air of some unspoken defeat, he rubbed his face anxiously when he ordered books at the till. He wouldn’t have lasted long, I think, on a battlefield. But he knew everything about the wars, knew each battle intimately, knew exactly where the detachments of Phocian troops were stationed on high mountain paths. I knew falconry like this. When I got my first hawk, years later, I was astounded by the reality of the thing. I was the carpet salesman at the battle of Thermopylae. It is summer 1979 and I am an eight-year-old girl in a bookshop. I’m standing under a skylight with a paperback in my hand and I am extremely puzzled. What is an eighteenth-century story of seduction? I had no idea. I read the words on the back cover again: The Goshawk is the story of a concerted duel between Mr White and a great beautiful hawk during the training of the latter – the record of an intense clash of wills in which the pride and endurance of the wild raptor are worn down and broken by the almost insane willpower of the schoolmaster falconer. It is comic; it is tragic; it is all absorbing. It is strangely like some of the eighteenth-century stories of seduction.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Of course our translators did not know that in mythology the nether world is the material earth and so they made it “grave,” King James Version. And thus are the keys obliterated. In the Prophet-version, this nether world is Babylon instead of Egypt. This is the same Babylon as in Revelation, namely earth, the mythic symbol of evil, corruption, materialism. But in this second version the cause of this captivity is different, and this because the prophets, so called, were priests. And to priests the cause of all trouble is sin; by this time these Hebrew epigoni had even developed a “conviction of sin,” and so sin was the cause. 4. Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward (the sin syndrome of religion; Isa. Chap. 1). Isaiah, Ezra, NehemiahThe Book of Isaiah is a lead-up to this “second captivity,” and if we read it knowingly the words become strangely like those of the first. 1. The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah (Chap. 1). 17. Behold, the Lord will carry thee away with a mighty captivity, and will surely cover thee (Chap. 22). 16. In that day shall Egypt be like unto women: and it shall be afraid and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts, which he shaketh over it. 17. And the land of Judah shall be a terror unto Egypt, every one that maketh mention thereof shall be afraid in himself, because of the counsel of the Lord of hosts, which he hath determined against it. 21. And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day, . . . 22. And the Lord shall smite Egypt . . . (Chap. 19). 15. And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod (Chap. 11). 5. And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of mount Zion, and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire by night . . . (Chap. 4). Now why all this talk about Egypt if the “second captivity” was in Babylon? And why this similarity to Exodus? Because Babylon and Egypt are one, and Isaiah is rewriting Exodus, as we are told Ezra did. His subject then is not the captivity of the Jewish people in Babylon but life’s captivity in matter, a universal event. In his preface he gives us a hint of this, and a hint to the wise should be sufficient. 11.

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

  3“We all pretend to be more of a man or a woman than we secretly suspect we are,” writes my friend Laura Miller. Thus, emblems: the tidy little acts of straightening a skirt and freshening makeup, shooting shirt cuffs, ruffling hair. Tiny details, unconscious habits, little trills of pretense and belonging. See me, they say, I am—whatever I hope I am. We cultivate those things which set us aside from the other, the opposite gender, squarely among our own. Over the last year, and with considerable surprise, I’ve come to realize I can’t define woman. I can’t tell you why I’m sure I am a woman, why others think I am, why my personal and internal experience seems to fit what culture tells me a woman’s experience should be. I am a woman because I look and act like the social convention called “woman.” But not wholly, or always. What I once thought a permanent and objective state seems to me more and more like a vapor, a fantasia, a wisp. I cherish femaleness and the company of other women simply because, well, they’re women. I don’t know what I mean when I say that men won’t “get something” I’m trying to explain, but I mean it, anyway. There are many feelings and ideas I would discuss only with another woman. Most of all, I crave the ease of women’s company, the inexplicable psychic repose their presence allows. I don’t have to know what they are, what I am, or what men are, to know the difference in how it feels to be with a woman or with a man. The markers of gender are neither objective nor permanent. Certain characteristics that are thought feminine, like my hair, skin texture, and posture are readily mutable, easy enough to disguise. My dress, my voice, and my mannerisms are even easier to camouflage or, conversely, imitate. A good cross-dresser has me pegged, doing what I do unconsciously with care and attention. I am less feminine than a lot of men, and I swear I don’t know how they do it, how it works. But for all that I’m less feminine in many ways than certain men are or could be, I’m infinitely more womanly, and it’s a rare cross-dresser that can’t be caught by a careful observer; that thing the observer catches, that clue, is as hard to define as any of these other terms. We are made biologically male or female by chromosome 23, and everyone starts out as a girl. A fetal gonad with two X chromosomes stays just as it is, barring disaster, and the fetus develops female. A fetal gonad with an X and a Y chromosome, though, transmutes and becomes a testis; the testis eventually begins to release androgens, and the androgens convert the genitalia to male form. Most of the time, anyway; there are a number of what are technically called sexual intergrades, rare in the general population, endlessly instructive.

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

  Very little of the pornography available uses images of coercion, and those are the carefully contracted ones of bondage and S/M. (Sometimes I wonder if the narrowed focus of porn, coupled with the natural intensity of sex, simply doesn’t leave much room for anything else.) The rest of our culture positively drips with violence. So it seems odd, and telling, once again, to presume that hard-to-find pornography is somehow more deeply influential than the news, advertising, and prime-time TV. But such is the fear of pornography, which is held out for censure as a special case, something apart, existing in another sphere. Lisa Palac, who founded the magazine Future Sex and has both done sexual performance and worked on pornographic films, sighed in a conversation with me the other day. It was a weary sigh. I’d been telling her about a feminist protest against an adult video store, a protest “against violence against women,” the kind of protest Lisa herself has endured. “I don’t care if the actors are really fucking or really coming. I don’t care as long as I believe they’re coming,” she said. “Everyone knows that the people who are shot and killed in Lethal Weapon don’t really die. They know what acting is. Why can’t they believe pornography is acting, too?” Many women enjoy adult films from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, once they see them. Other women enjoy—when they discover them—gay male films, which are often tender as well as powerfully erotic, and feature remarkably good-looking men. Laura Miller, who works at Good Vibrations, has hosted video nights for women who have never seen pornography. She shows clips from some of the new, more romantic, female-produced films, and then clips from older hard-core films with more traditional themes. “The difficult part for women is that they haven’t had the opportunity to even see what’s available,” she says. The surprise is how many of the women prefer the old hard-core films. “It’s so politically incorrect. I’m glad when they’re willing to admit that it really turns them on, but they also say, ‘It really disturbs me, but this works, and the other one didn’t.’ ” That every culture has its own sexual mores is a given. That every country has its own pornography is not: In our ethnocentricity we tend to assume that with minor variations what is erotic to us will be erotic to another. But the sexual material of a culture reflects that culture’s concerns. In America, the adolescent rut—eternal erection and ready orgasm. In England, book after book about spanking, sex across class lines, and a detailed interest in underwear; in Germany, leather-clad blondes whipping swarthy men; in Italy, an interest in feminized men; in Japan, a preoccupation with icons of innocence (schoolgirls, nurses, brides), soiled innocence (widows), and maternal nurturing. In Japanese pornography active female pleasure is considered a turnoff. I’ve never seen an American film that didn’t feature it.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Machulis cites the “genetic imperative” for sex and reproduction as the mechanism that drives the cycle of technological innovation and adoption. Perhaps that is why he is already a step ahead of Randal Oulton on the virtual pregnancy front. Among his many other activities, Machulis is a technology reporter for MMOrgy.com, a blog dedicated to reporting on sex in massively multi-player virtual worlds. In 2006, he posted an essay on the subject of teledildonic conception. The essay deals with many logistical, technological, ethical and emotional issues, but here is his basic concept: John and Jane decide they want to have a baby in their virtual world relationship. They contact BabyCorp. BabyCorp requests that each of the parent-customers send in a real picture of their faces. After this, the more the couple spends, the more they can customize. Otherwise it’s left to “Nature” (Nature being the name of BabyCorp’s server farm). As part of the package, the couple is sent the BabyCorp hardware/software package, consisting of male and female teledildonics equipment…. The couple copulates, using the BabyCorp package. The software relays the depth of the male stroking, which controls the speed of the woman’s vibrator. For sake of argument, let’s say the vibrator also contains a pump, fluid storage unit, and heater. At the time of John’s orgasm, the pump goes to work on Jane’s side. Over at BabyCorp, the servers pick up that conception has happened, and Nature goes to work. Combining the pictures sent in by the couple, along with aging algorithms and a few mutations thrown in for good measure, the baby’s facial textures are formed. After the gestation time selected by the couple (Once again, depth of immersion in gestation time [ultrasound, virtual la maze classes, etc.] is figured by parental monetary investment), a bouncing virtual baby is born, possibly with mom’s nose, or dad’s eyes. All of the technology exists now, or could easily be manufactured, to make this theoretical model a reality. And given the number of virtual conceptions already happening, it appears there is a market. On occasion, Machulis himself is overwhelmed by the implications of his own ideas. He winds up his disquisition on virtual pregnancy, clearly having explored the subject past his own comfort level, with these words: “I’m going to go spend the rest of my evening in the bathtub, crying. This is a crazy world we live in, and it’s just getting crazier. It’s hard to deal with this shit when other people do it, much less be the one coming up with it. I’d quit this stuff and go make flying cars, but people would probably just crash them.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  In an age all too happy to collapse the sodomitical mother into the MILF, how can rampant, “deviant” sexual activity remain the marker of radicality? What sense does it make to align “queer” with “sexual deviance,” when the ostensibly straight world is having no trouble keeping pace? Who, in the straight world, besides some diehard religious conservatives, truly experiences sexual pleasure as inextricably linked to reproductive function? Has anyone looked at the endless list of fetishes on a “straight” porn website recently? Have you read, as I did this morning, about the trial of Officer Gilberto Valle? If queerness is about disturbing normative sexual assumptions and practices, isn’t one of these that sex is the be-all and end-all? What if Beatriz Preciado is right—what if we’ve entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that Preciado calls the “pharma-copornographic era,” whose principal economic resource is nothing other than “the insatiable bodies of the multitudes—their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neurosexual synapses … [our] desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction, and … pleasure”? Faced with the warp speed of this “new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism,” especially from my station of fatigue, exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped. I first met Sedgwick in a graduate seminar titled Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology. By way of introduction, she announced that she had started going to therapy because she wanted to be happier. To hear a scary theoretical heavyweight admit such a thing changed my life. Then, without missing a beat, she said she wanted to play a quick get-to-know-you game involving totem animals. Totem animals? How could it be that I had fled the spacey Haight-Ashbury of my youth for hard-core, intellectual New York, explicitly to escape games involving totem animals, only to find myself in the middle of one in a doctoral classroom? The game placed an icy finger on my identity phobia: it was but a short leap from here, I felt, to the index card, Sharpie, and lapel pin. Perhaps anticipating this horror, Sedgwick explained to us that the game had a kind of out. She said that we were free to offer up a fake animal, a kind of decoy identification, if we so desired—if, for example, we had a “real” totem animal that we would prefer to keep to ourselves.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Ancient medicine wasn’t quite as unsophisticated as we moderns sometimes imagine, but it wasn’t that effective either. In any given community there would be many suffering from long-term problems, from the broken bone that hadn’t healed properly to the persistent, year-in-and-year-out hemorrhage. And with almost every bodily problem came some sort of social problem: the farm worker who couldn’t plough anymore, the “unclean” woman who couldn’t share food with her family. So wherever Jesus went, he healed people. “He went on through the whole of Galilee,” says Matthew, “teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, healing every disease and every illness among the people” (4:23). There is every reason to suppose that this is exactly what most people saw going on as Jesus of Nazareth launched his strange, short public career . Already we are back again in the eye of our own, modern historical storm. Skeptics have always scoffed at these stories. We know, they say, that “miracles” don’t happen. People are attracted to a charismatic leader, and so they make up stories to boost his reputation. In any case, what sort of a “god” is it who “intervenes” in this way? But then others say, no, “miracles” are what you’d expect if there’s a “supernatural” God and if Jesus is his son. And then a third element asks: what do we actually know about these things within first-century history anyway? It’s a shame to stop the story when it’s hardly begun, but let’s freeze the frame for a moment and address these well-known questions. If we don’t, seeds of doubt may be planted. There’s no time for extensive answers; four quick ones will do for the moment. First, Jesus attracted large crowds. A thousand little features of the stories put this beyond doubt. When we ask why, the gospels all say it was because he was healing people. The link between healing and crowds is made in all the sources. Second, we find reports at various points of opponents accusing Jesus of being in league with the devil—with the “Shame Lord” (Beelzebul) or something similar. Scholars have often suggested that many Jesus stories were invented by his followers later on. But those who loved and worshipped Jesus wouldn’t have invented tales of his being involved in dark arts. People don’t accuse you of being in league with the devil unless you are doing pretty remarkable things. Third, as we shall see, the explanation Jesus gave for what was going on was that something new was happening—something powerful, dramatic, different. If all he’d been doing was encouraging people to feel better about themselves and not actually transforming their real lives, there would have been no sign of anything new. There would have been nothing to explain. His explanations only make sense if the thing they are explaining is sufficiently startling to raise questions. Fourth, it may be time to be skeptical about skepticism itself.

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

  Riding Westward.” Eventually, to my astonishment, one of them cried in bewilderment: “Miss Armstrong, what exactly did happen on Good Friday?” I used to look with pity at the young teacher who was the sole member of the religious department and taught only a tiny number of students at the advanced level. What a dead-end subject! In fact, however, in other parts of the world, this skeptical indifference was becoming eccentric and even old-fashioned. The countries of northern Europe were indeed responding to the peculiar strain of the late twentieth century by renouncing religion. For many, God had died in Auschwitz. The churches had been implicated in the Holocaust, and the traumatic experience of two world wars, fought on European soil, had left a legacy of unanswered questions. But other regions reacted differently. The United States, whose experience of the twentieth century had been more positive, was becoming more religious all the time: by the year 2000 it would be the second most religious country in the world after India. In the Middle East, as the Arab-Israeli conflict entered its third decade without hope of resolution, the secular ideologies of socialism and nationalism seemed increasingly bankrupt; after the wars of 1967 and 1973, there was a religious revival among both Israelis and Arabs, and on both sides, the new religiosity became sucked into the conflict. In 1978–79, a bemused world witnessed the Iranian Revolution, when an obscure mullah overthrew what had seemed to be one of the most stable and successfully secular countries in the Middle East. People were shocked. “Who ever cared about religion?” cried a frustrated official in the United States State Department. But 1979 also saw the eruption of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority into American politics. Even though its success was short lived, it proved to be a watershed. Henceforth presidential candidates often found it advisable to sport their born-again credentials. In the middle of the twentieth century, it had been assumed that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a major role in world events. But there was now a swing away from this position. Increasingly, people who were disenchanted with modernity felt impelled to push God from the sidelines to which he had been relegated in secular culture, and back to center stage. The extremists grabbed the headlines, and at this point I regarded them simply as a lunatic fringe, a dangerous bunch of fanatics.

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

  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. Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant—a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable—but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the notice board, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the notice board on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room. So now I found that whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St. Anne’s into line with the sixties. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Imagine, again, trying to explain the United States of the early 1960s to a visitor from Mars with short, dense books of Kennedy memorabilia as your main sources. In any particular historical context, certain things made sense, certain ideas and actions went together in a way that felt entirely natural at the time, but that we may well have to reconstruct with considerable difficulty. Sometimes, doing first-century history, people use this difficulty as a way of saying that Jesus and his followers couldn’t have thought like this or like that: if we find a certain idea difficult or puzzling, how could they (poor, pre-Enlightenment souls!) possibly have gotten their minds around it? Sometimes people argue the other way around. We, today, are eager to ask certain questions (for instance, “Do heaven and hell exist, and how can I get to the first and avoid the second?”); and so we assume, too readily, that people in Jesus’s day were eager to ask those questions as well, meaning pretty much the same by them as we do now. But if we are to do real history, we have to allow people in other times and other places to be radically different from us—even though, in order to do history at all, we have to exercise disciplined imagination and try as best we can to relate to those very different people. It’s a challenge. But it’s one I believe we can meet. What matters, I have become convinced, is that we need to understand how worldviews work. If you have been born and bred within a culture that tells certain stories, observes certain customs and festivals, practices particular domestic habits, and sings particular songs, and if these things all go together and reinforce one another, a single phrase or action may well carry multiple layers of meaning. Imagine our visiting Martian landing this time in the middle of a game of baseball or cricket. Those of us who have played those games appreciate the subtleties, the nuances, the finely balanced match, the implications of how the ball is pitched or bowled, of who it is that’s coming up to bat next. We know what it means when people, attending those games, sing particular songs. You or I would take all of that in at a glance, but it might take us an hour or more to explain it, in all its detail, to our alien guest. That doesn’t mean it’s horribly theoretical or abstract. It only means that most people, most of the time, live more complex lives than we often realize.