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 Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, re-shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's flourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston[235] is composed of stuff like this passage picked out at random: "The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmosphered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes,—those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms,—they descend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organism."[236] There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw; that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense—even the wildest words in a dream—if one only does not doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy, self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves. To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain grammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part of our impression that a sentence has a meaning and is dominated by the Unity of one Thought.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to the greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only in violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the knees, there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was seldom precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes of the patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table, given to his arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most inconvenient attitudes, without his having a suspicion of it. The expression of astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal of the handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words. Only when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke of dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes inferred from the sounds connected with the manipulation that something special was being done with him . . . . He had no feelings of muscular fatigue. If, with his eyes shut, we told him to raise his arm and to keep it up, he did so without trouble. After one or two minutes, however, the arm began to tremble and sink without his being aware of it. He asserted still his ability to keep it up . . . . Passively holding still his fingers did not affect him. He thought constantly that he opened and shut his hand, whereas it was really fixed." Or we read of cases like this: "Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the moment the patient ceases to take note of them by his eyes. Thus, after having made him close his eyes, if one asks him to move one of his limbs either wholly or in part, he does it but cannot tell whether the effected movement is large or small, strong or weak, or even if it has taken place at all. And when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from right to left, for example, he declares that he had a very inexact notion of the extent of the effected movement. . . . If, having the intention of executing a certain movement, I prevent him, he does not perceive it, and supposes the limb to have taken the position he intended to give it."[449] Or this: "The patient, when his eyes were closed in the middle of an unpractised movement, remained with the extremity in the position it had when the eyes closed and did not complete the movement properly. Then after some oscillations the limb gradually sank by reason of its weight (the sense of fatigue being absent). Of this the patient was not aware, and wondered, when he opened his eyes, at the altered position of his limb."[450]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In other words, a blurred picture is just as much a single mental fact as a sharp picture is; and the use of either picture by the mind to symbolize a whole class of individuals is a new mental function, requiring some other modification of consciousness than the mere perception that the picture is distinct or not. I may bewail the indistinctness of my mental image of my absent friend. That does not prevent my thought from meaning him alone, however. And I may mean all mankind, with perhaps a very sharp image of one man in my mind's eye. The meaning is a function of the more I transitive' parts of consciousness, the 'fringe' of relations which we feel surrounding the image, be the latter sharp or dim. This was explained in a previous place (see p. 473 ff., especially the note to page 477), and I would not touch upon the matter at all here but for its historical interest. Our ideas or images of past sensible experiences may then be either distinct and adequate or dim, blurred, and incomplete. It is likely that the different degrees in which different men are able to make them sharp and complete has had something to do with keeping up such philosophic disputes as that of Berkeley with Locke over abstract ideas. Locke had spoken of our possessing 'the general idea of a triangle' which "must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once." Berkeley says: "If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle as is here described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader would fully and certainly inform himself whether he has such an idea or no."[57] Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such faculties as 'the Imagination.' Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not 'The Imagination,' and they must be studied in detail. INDIVIDUALS DIFFER IN IMAGINATION. The first breaker of ground in this direction was Fechner, in 1860. Fechner was gifted with unusual talent for subjective observation, and in chapter xiv of his 'Psychophysik' he gave the results of a most careful comparison of his own optical after-images, with his optical memory-pictures, together with accounts by several other individuals of their optical memory-pictures.[58] The results was to show a great personal diversity. "It would be interesting," he writes, to work up the subject statistically; and I regret that other occupations have kept me from fulfilling my earlier intention to proceed in this way."

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Mother had sat on the counter stool, sipping at the milk and ratcheting up her pissed-off with every whisper sweep of the clock till it came to her Harold needed a piece of her mind. She’d pelted him with a pastry, then kicked him not very hard, she’d told Lecia, and mostly in his big fat ass. Then she got her pistol out again and fired it over Harold’s head, and he’d screamed himself awake. Somewhere in there, he’d pissed his pants. She couldn’t shift him off the kitchen floor, so she called to Tex, who hauled Harold to detox. She shot at him? I say. That’s exactly what I said. You shot at him? Lecia says. So embarrassing. Lecia’s our only family member plagued by a sense of propriety. She belongs to civic groups and the country club. She’d that morning taken from Mother’s house every gun she could rustle up. Do I know of any little pistols laying around? I don’t. It’s like the old days, I say. Remember her shooting at Hector? (Lecia and I had draped ourselves over our stepfather’s semi-supine form while Mother brandished a firearm.) Daddy, too. When did she shoot at Daddy? You were too little to remember. I know I told you about it. One Christmas. You never saw the bullet hole in the kitchen tile by the stove? I thought Daddy was cleaning a pistol. Why’d she shoot at him? The better question is, Lecia adds, why’d she shoot at anybody? There was a pause, and we said in unison, To get their attention. Which had been her standard explanation over the years. I know a lot of people, Lecia says. I know a lot of people who’re drunks. I even know a lot of drunks with guns—and grudges. Our mother’s the only person I know ever shot at anybody. It seems a nasty side effect of sleeping with her. In fairness to her, Lecia says, she sounds contrite. Maybe we could check her in the same place as Harold, I say. They could go in on the buddy system, like the navy. Later, Tex calls to announce he’s shepherding Harold through the hospital’s recovery meetings, with Mother visiting every day (such loyalty makes me wonder if she makes her alleged weekly visits to Daddy in the home—though they no doubt barely register on him.) Tex can’t keep the bemusement out of his voice when he adds, You’ll never guess what she wound up doing this morning? Going to one of those supportive-wives’ meetings? Yes, ma’am. Like a witch in church, I say. Some lady put her off by talking about wiping her husband’s ass, and Mother claimed she got sick to her stomach. Anyway, Harold and I were in the meeting across the hall with all the drunks. Everybody laughing and raising hell. So she wound up crossing over. She went to a meeting of sober drunks? She did.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  According to Eddie Diamond, who heard it from one of the Greenies, she took a greedy pleasure in night patrols. She was good at it; she had the moves. All camouflaged up, her face smooth and vacant, she seemed to flow like water through the dark, like oil, without sound or center. She went barefoot. She stopped carrying a weapon. There were times, apparently, when she took crazy, death-wish chances—things that even the Greenies balked at. It was as if she were taunting some wild creature out in the bush, or in her head, inviting it to show itself, a curious game of hide-and go-seek that was played out in the dense terrain of a nightmare. She was lost inside herself. On occasion, when they were taken under fire, Mary Anne would stand quietly and watch the tracer rounds snap by, a little smile at her lips, intent on some private transaction with the war. Other times she would simply vanish altogether—for hours, for days. And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back. No body was ever found. No equipment, no clothing. For all he knew, Rat said, the girl was still alive. Maybe up in one of the high mountain villes, maybe with the Montagnard tribes. But that was guesswork. There was an inquiry, of course, and a week-long air search, and for a time the Tra Bong compound went crazy with MP and CID types. In the end, however, nothing came of it. It was a war and the war went on. Mark Fossie was busted to PFC, shipped back to a hospital in the States, and two months later received a medical discharge. Mary Anne Bell joined the missing. But the story did not end there. If you believed the Greenies, Rat said, Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark. Odd movements, odd shapes. Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them—a watched feeling—and a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill. Stockings Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. The ironies went beyond him. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn toward sentimentality. Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck before heading out on ambush.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I was on the surgical table twenty-four hours. If the cabdriver from rehab hadn’t come by, I’d have died for sure—a lot of coincidences went into getting me here. Plus, they said I’d never walk again. Those things were gifts. A gift? I say, blinking with disbelief, for this is the kind of shit people said that makes me nuts. Without my brain injury, Deb says, I’d never have quit drinking. It saved my life. It was a higher-power thing. I don’t get that stuff, I say. You’re not praying yet? Deb wants to know. I am…well, barely. I figured out that asking for relief from the craving every morning seemed to make it go away. I figure it’s like I mesmerize myself. But God? No way. I’m an agnostic. A spike-haired blonde passing by with a cup of coffee says, Another intellectual? Lucky you. Janice, this is Mary. Janice slides next to me, saying, Like the Blessed Mother, huh? She gives off the kind of outlaw ethos that appeals to me . Deb says, Mary’s reluctant to get down on her knees because she doesn’t believe in God. I add, What kind of God wants me to get on my knees and supplicate myself like a coolie? Janice busts out with a cackling laugh, You don’t do it for God! You do it for yourself. All this is for you…the prayer, the meditation, even the service work. I do it for myself, too. I’m not that benevolent. How does getting on your knees do anything for you? I say. Janice says, It makes you the right size. You do it to teach yourself something. When my disease has ahold of me, it tells me my suffering is special or unique, but it’s the same as everybody’s. I kneel to put my body in that place, because otherwise, my mind can’t grasp it. Out of the kitchen holding a crockery mug comes a lady with cropped dark hair and eyes the color of fresh-dug earth. Liz has the frank, inquisitive gaze of a trained scientist, but softer in its aspect. The clubhouse/college-dorm feel of this place suggests a camaraderie lacking with my writer pals. Can we help her not drink? Deb asks, Liz. And it appears a sincere question. Absolutely, Liz says, pulling up a chair. We’re all about the not-drinking thing. From the TV in the living room, the mongoose is announcing his name in a chittering falsetto: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi! Deb explains that Liz had run a lab at MIT, adding, She had a hard time with the higher-power thing, too. I stayed sober a year, but I was white-knuckling it, Liz says. It was hell, and I drank again. Second time around, I started the prayer stuff. You get miserable enough, you’ll take suggestions. Liz envisions her higher power as a sober part of herself—some saner, more adult aspect of her own psyche. She says, It’s not so different than Freud’s superego—or healthy ego.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  I groaned inwardly, hoping he wouldn’t for the umpteenth time tell the story about running into one of the members of the University of the Trees in the public restroom, and striking up a conversation about vitamins, health, and a green powder called spirulina. Ray had told all of us multiple times about the spirulina superfood, a blue-green algae that had been around for millions of years. According to Ray and everyone else at The University of the Trees, in the near future, spirulina would knock out cancer. The algae was already known for weight loss, detox, improving mental function, and basically curing most anything that could go wrong with a person’s health. Ray’s conversation with one of the University of the Trees community members in the bathroom had given him chills of inspiration. He always ended his story with, “I knew I needed to see more of what University had to offer.” Every time someone asked us why we left Synanon, he told that story, along with all the reasons Synanon came up short in his eyes. Two days after our Kerista visit, the commune became a non-option, much to my relief. Theresa and Ray got a call back and were told that although they liked Theresa, they didn’t feel Ray would be a good fit. Kerista could not accept them as a couple, though Theresa was welcome to join the community on her own. The second commune our family visited was the University of the Trees. We left Santa Clara in the evening and an hour later we were cautiously making our way along a curvy two lane highway, which ran through the middle of a redwood forest. I stared out the window at the trees, appearing in the night as dark, towering, indiscriminate shapes crowding out the shoulders of the road. Unfamiliar with the terrain and intimidated by the curves, Ray drove at 30 mph, pulling over when he could, to let strings of cars whiz past, leaving us momentarily to ourselves on the wooded road. We rolled into the small town of Boulder Creek at around 8 pm that evening. The historic buildings of Boulder Creek, which lined the main drag, looked as if they had been carted off the set of the TV western Bonanza. The stores appeared to have shuttered hours ago. Ray peered out the windshield in the frantic way he did when he drove on freeways or looked for an unfamiliar street, as if he had just escaped a high-speed chase from someone in the mafia. We made a left turn and drove up a hilly neighborhood. After a moment or so, we located the house we were searching for. To my relief it looked like all the other ordinary houses on the street. The people who greeted us were also normal looking.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀάω, old Ep. Verb, used by Hom. in aor. act. diioa contr. doa, med. dticdpuny contr. ἀσάμην, and pass. ἀάσθην : the pres. occurs only in 3 sing. of Med. ἀᾶται 1]. Properly to hurt, damage, but always used in reference to the mind, fo mislead, infatuate, of the effects of wine, sleep, divine judgments, etc., ἄασάν μ᾽ ἕταροί τε κακοὶ πρὸς τοῖσί τε ὕπνος Od. το. 68; doé με δαίμονος αἶσα κακὴ καὶ... οἶνος 11. 61; φρένας dace οἴνῳ 21. 296; inf. ἄσαι Aesch. Fr. 428; part. ἄσας Soph. Fr. 554:—so in Med.,”Arn ἣ πάντας ἀᾶται Il. 19, 91, 129 :—Pass., ἀάσθην Hes. Op. 281. II. the aor. med. has an intr. sense, ¢o act recklessly or foolishly, ἀασάμην I was infatuated, ll. 9. 116, 110, εἴς. ; ἀάσατο δὲ μέγα θυμῷ Ib. 537., 11. 340; καὶ yap δή νύ ποτε Ζεὺς ἄσατο (as Aris- tarch., whereas others read Ζῆν᾽ ἄσατο sc. "ΑΤΉ), 19. 95, V. Schol. Ven. ; εἴ τί περ ἀασάμην Ap. Rh. 1. 13333 ἀασάμην... ἄτην 2. 623; so also aor. pass., μέγ᾽ ἀάσθη Il. τό. 685.—Cf. Buttm. Lexil. 5. ν. ἀᾶσαι. (Hence ἀ-άατος, arn, dvatos. Originally it had the digamma, ἀξάω, v. sub ἄτη and daatos. Hesych. also cites ἀγατᾶσθαι (i.e. ἀξατᾶσθαι) = βλάπτε- σθαι, and ἀγάτημαι (i.e. ἀξάτημαι) = βέβλαμμαι.) Ethe usual quantity II. &, Dor. for relat. Pron. ἥ. IIT. 4, a 2 Ba — aBoros. is Gdcev Gdodpny, part. ddcas; but ἄᾶσαν Od. το. 68; ἄᾶσατο and ἄασθην Il. ll. c.; but ἄᾶσατο 11. 340, ἄασθη ἢ. Hom. Cer. 247.] ἅβα, ἡ, Dor. for ἥβη. ἀβαθής, és, (βάθος) not deep, Arr. Tact. 5.6; ἐπιφάνεια ἀβ. without depth, Sext. Emp. p. 475. 5 Bekk. ἄ-βαθρος, ov, without foundation, Georg. Pisid. GBaKéew, (ἀβακής) to be speechless, Ep. Verb. only used in aor., of δ᾽ ἀβάκησαν πάντες said nothing, took no heed, Od. 4. 249. GBanns, és, (Baw) speechless, Lat. infans: hence childlike, innocent, φρήν Sappho 77 (where E. M. has acc. ἀβάκην). Δάν. -κέως E. M.— Hesych. has also ἀβακήμων : and ἀβαξ is cited by Eust. 1494. 64. ἀβακίζομαι, Dep., = ἀβακέω, Anacr. 74. ἀβάκιον, τό, v. sub ἄβαξ. ἀβᾶακίσκος, 6, Dim. of ἄβαξ, a small stone for inlaying, in mosaic work, Lat. ¢essera, tessella, Moschio ap. Ath. 207 Ὁ. ἀβακο-ειδής, és, like an ἄβαξ, Schol. Theocr. 4. 61. ἀ-βάκχευτος, ov, uninitiated in the Bacchic orgies, Eur. Bacch. 472: generally, joyless, Id. Or. 319; v. Luc. Lap. 3. ἀβᾶλε [a8], properly ἃ βάλε, expressing a wish, O ¢hat..! Lat. wtinam, c. indic., Callim. Fr. 455 ; c. inf., Anth. P. 7. 699. Cf. Bare. ἀ-βάναυσος, ov, liberal : in Adv. —ws, Clem. Rom. 1. 44.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Rat pushed himself up. He took the flashlight, muttered something, and moved down to the far end of the hootch. For privacy, the men had rigged up curtained walls around their cots, small makeshift bedrooms, and in the dark Rat went quickly from room to room, using the flashlight to pluck out the faces. Eddie Diamond slept a hard deep sleep—the others, too. To be sure, though, Rat checked once more, very carefully, then he reported back to Fossie. "All accounted for. No extras." "Eddie?" "Darvon dreams." Rat switched off the flashlight and tried to think it out. "Maybe she just—I don't know—maybe she camped out tonight. Under the stars or something. You search the compound?" "Sure I did." "Well, come on," Rat said. "One more time." Outside, a soft violet light was spreading out across the eastern hillsides. Two or three ARVN soldiers had built their breakfast fires, but the place was mostly quiet and unmoving. They tried the helipad first, then the mess hall and supply hootches, then they walked the entire six hundred meters of perimeter. "Okay," Rat finally said. "We got a problem." When he first told the story, Rat stopped there and looked at Mitchell Sanders for a time. "So what's your vote? Where was she?" "The Greenies," Sanders said. "Yeah?" Sanders gave him a savvy little smirk. "No other option. That stuff about the Special Forces—how they used the place as a base of operations, how they'd glide in and out—all that had to be there for a reason. That's how stories work, man." Rat thought about it, then shrugged. "All right, sure, the Greenies. But it's not what Fossie thought. She wasn't sleeping with any of them. At least not exactly. I mean, in a way she was sleeping with a// of them, more or less, except it wasn't sex or anything. They was just lying together, so to speak, Mary Anne and these six grungy weirded-out Green Berets." "Lying down?" Sanders said. "You got it." "Lying down how?" Rat smiled. "Ambush. All night long, man, Mary Anne's out on fuckin' ambush." ok ok ok Just after sunrise, Rat said, she came trooping in through the wire, tired- looking but cheerful as she dropped her gear and gave Mark Fossie a brisk hug. The six Green Berets did not speak. One of them nodded at her, and the others gave Fossie a long stare, then they filed off to their hootch at the edge of the compound. "Please," she said. "Not a word." Fossie took a half step forward and hesitated. It was as though he had trouble recognizing her. She wore a bush hat and filthy green fatigues; she carried the standard M-16 automatic assault rifle; her face was black with charcoal. Mary Anne handed him the weapon. "I'm exhausted," she said. "We'll talk later."

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  She explained how one day it occurred to her that it would be “far out” to form, like, a group of lovers. Jud, who had been instrumental in starting the community, thought that she and a few of the others were onto something. It had been difficult at times for all of them in overcoming their societal conditioning toward monogamy, but they were all committed and faithful to each other. They invented the word “polyfidelity” to explain their arrangement and, over time, the original B-FIC had grown from a handful of members. I glanced at the happy couple on the cover of the brochure again. The woman had married someone far, far older than herself, like my first-grade teacher, Jenny, in Synanon. Just a few months after Betty, the wife of founder Chuck, had passed away from cancer, Chuck had begun dating again. Jenny had announced to my class on a spring morning that she would be out of town the following week because she had a date with Chuck. Why Jenny had wanted to date someone who could possibly pass for her grandfather had been a mystery to me, and this strange union between this young woman and her much older husband I found just as baffling and, frankly, gross. Where did all of this B-FIC business leave Sara and me? I wondered while I rummaged through the booklets. If people were married in groups, where did the kids live? I saw nothing in the literature about how the children were housed. When I’d lived in Synanon, I had stayed in dormitories with other kids, separate from the adults’ quarters. Men and women called demonstrators took care of us children and acted as role models of the exemplary Synanonite. Parents had been discouraged from spending too much time with their offspring, based on Chuck’s distorted view that parental influence psychologically poisoned children. I discovered an example of a sleeping arrangement for a B-FIC in a different Kerista booklet. It was not unlike trying to figure out a complicated subway schedule. The women appeared to stay in the same rooms and were visited by their different husbands according to some hierarchy of who came to the commune when. The husbands bed hopped every night to the different rooms, and it appeared that some of the wives resided in different buildings. I set the schedule down after getting lost on the second week in the month and stared at Sara, biting my lip. She sat in a corner by herself, her knees drawn up, clutching an Archie comic. Her short, dark hair was slick and straight on some parts of her head, but rose up spiky in other sections. Still flat chested, with a husky build, her body was a curve-less block of musculature that contained a wide waist extending to straight hips, and on down to thick, stout legs.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  At one time a seminary of Claretian novitiates, the old campus and sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival style building was now home to the New Age spiritualist group that studied the teachings of the ascended masters. There did not seem to be anyone around when we arrived. From the parking lot we set forth on a foot path lined with rose bushes and impatiens to the impressive elegant structure, which sat atop a grassy knoll. At the entrance we were greeted by an elderly man wearing slacks and a sweater vest of an indiscriminate color, his white hair carefully combed and parted at the side. My eyes needed a moment to adjust to the dim lighting when we stepped inside and onto a plush carpet. “We are having our meditation now. Please, would you care to join us?” he said with quiet enthusiasm. Theresa and Ray accepted the offer. Sara and I opted out. We watched our parents follow the old man down the hallway. Left alone in the foyer, which now that it was coming into focus seemed to have the air of a funeral parlor, we studied several enlarged portraits of Elizabeth Clare Prophet and various solemn-looking ascended masters bathed in pastel-colored backdrops. In every picture of Elizabeth, she was dressed either in a suit or a gauzy blouse, the neckline plunging into feminine ruffles. She stared back, haloed in soft lighting with a look of contemplative benevolence. Sara walked away after a bit, and I trailed after her. Unsure what to do next, we opened one of the closed doors along the expansive hallway and peeked into an empty classroom. There were wooden desks and a blackboard with sweeping erasure strokes, the powdery chalk residue all that was left of the last lesson. We stepped into the room and closed the door quietly behind us. I examined a shelf of books, an eclectic assortment of academic texts and spiritual New Age readers. Examples of the children’s schoolwork hung on the walls, short essays, science papers, and artwork. One essay explored the benefits of meditation. I read it with bland interest. Ray meditated twice a day, and once a day, he and Theresa chanted. The book they chanted from was sectioned into colors, each color representing the energy of a particular chakra. The words of the chants were meant to be said in quick succession one word flowing into the next, until their voices just became one long babbling, incoherent rush, as if they were auctioning off prayers, punctuated now and then by clear affirmations, “And so he said!” or “And in the name of the light!” Prayer beads were picked up, jingled, and laid back down. This sometimes went on for a good hour. Meditation time meant that Sara and I had to be really quiet. Typically, Ray flung open the door of his room during the meditation, his narrow face twisted in rage to scream that we were making too much noise.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Sam had been on a tarmac bagging bodies unloaded from a helicopter fresh from the carnage of the Tet Offensive. He’d peeled back one tarp and looked down into his own face. Which was his brother’s, of course. Mary, he said, pray the Lord you never see a face like that. One half was like the inside of a roast you left outside. Just blown slap off. His ear had stayed perfect, though. I wanted something of my brother’s power. And I’d had a vision before I got shipped in-country. In a big cathedral, he was, wearing his dress blues. He was praying over my casket. That’s what was supposed to of happened. Instead, he got his face shot off. The wind eked in the window seals, and the car shook. What scared me most was the crying part of Sam had been cauterized already. He was a living scar. All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that. And now I’d flagged it down and climbed in a car with it. We rounded the curve into Dana Point. The car lunged up to a light. It shuddered and died. I jammed my skinny arm through the window slot, slick as a length of licorice, and yanked the door open. I didn’t so much jump from the car as eject myself out on the roadside slope. The effort launched me downward, sliding. Over gravel and scrub oak, rocks scraping my shins. I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losing a flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me. He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook. I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless. By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me. At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "So they pack up and start humping. They head down the mountain, back to base camp, and when they get there they don't say diddly. They don't talk. Not a word, like they're deaf and dumb. Later on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there. What'd they hear? Why all the ordnance? The man's ragged out, he gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent six trillion dollars on firepower, and this fatass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the fuckin' story is. "But the guys don't say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can't ever say. It says, man, you got wax in your ears. It says, poor bastard, you'll never know—wrong frequency—you don't even want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you don't ever tell." You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever. Not when Mitchell Sanders stood up and moved off into the dark. It all happened. Even now, at this instant, I remember that yo-yo. In a way, I suppose, you had to be there, you had to hear it, but I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth. And I remember sitting at my foxhole that night, watching the shadows of Quang Ngai, thinking about the coming day and how we would cross the river and march west into the mountains, all the ways I might die, all the things I did not understand. Late in the night Mitchell Sanders touched my shoulder. "Just came to me," he whispered. "The moral, I mean. Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin’. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody's sweet little virgin girlfriend. What they need is to go out on LP. The vapors, man. Trees and rocks—you got to listen to your enemy." And then again, in the morning, Sanders came up to me. The platoon was preparing to move out, checking weapons, going through all the rituals that preceded a day's march. Already the lead squad had crossed the river and was filing off toward the west. "I got a confession to make," Sanders said. "Last night, man, I had to make up a few things." "T know that." "The glee club. There wasn't any glee club." "Right." "No opera." "Forget it, I understand." "Yeah, but listen, it's still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard sound you just plain won't believe. " Sanders pulled on his rucksack, closed his eyes for a moment, and let out a short, throat-clearing sigh. I knew what was coming.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Larry watched silently, uttering only one sentence: “Are you ready to go, Theresa?” Once we were on the highway, Theresa turned in her seat to glance at me, her bottom lip tucked under her large front teeth, her face happy, excited. Larry focused on the road. “What do you think of my new husband?” Theresa asked. Her eyes twinkled at me, and I realized she expected an answer. I leaned forward so I could get a better look at Larry’s taciturn profile. Theresa also examined him as if she were sizing up a pet she’d recently purchased and wasn’t sure she’d made the right choice. Larry was boring, I decided. The robotic Abraham Lincoln, my least favorite attraction at Disneyland, was more entertaining than Larry, who had inexplicably become part of my mother’s and my life through their mysterious marriage, which I was just now learning of. “Nice,” I said. My answer seemed to satisfy Theresa because she turned to face the road. “We just recently got love matched,” she remarked. “Oh,” I said. I knew love matched was the same as married. Their union was just another fragmentary incident for me, part of a string of sketchy situations that I’d come to accept in my short life. Larry drove with one hand and rested the other on the seat. Theresa’s fingers grazed his lightly. “I thought maybe we’d go to Fisherman’s Wharf,” he said, pulling his hand away to place it on the steering wheel. We went to Fisherman’s Wharf. The air smelled of the sea. Flocks of gulls glided on the wind current in the bright sky. Boats of various sizes bobbed in the marina. Other tourists like us strolled the walkway and creaking wooden wharfs. Until that rare visit with my mother and her new husband, I had no awareness of the experiment that was going on at Synanon. The reform, called Changing Partners, consisted of mass divorce followed by remarriage to a new partner. After Chuck Dederich took my young teacher Ginny to be his new wife, he wanted everyone in the community to start a new relationship. His first guinea pig was his daughter Jady. Having been displeased for quite a while with Jady’s husband, Dederich began to pressure her to divorce and marry someone else in the community whom Dederich felt more suitable for upper management grooming. With this first successful breakup, Dederich got other Synanon VIPs involved in divorcing and remarrying. As more couples followed suit, the ones who held out were pressured to leave their marriages and find someone new. It’s “no more trouble than casting off an old coat,” Dederich told members who balked at this drastic request. In the fall of 1977, Changing Partners became an official mandate. Whether members were happy with their present spouse or not, it was time to take a of leap faith.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Theresa was twenty years old, with a slim, petite figure, fine features, greenish eyes and dark shoulder-length hair, a Natalie Wood look-alike. When my father, Jim, first glimpsed her, he told me he thought he’d witnessed an angel. He spent the next hour at the club searching for the elusive beauty. When a friend talked him into meeting a particular girl later that evening, he reluctantly agreed. The girl turned out to be Theresa. My father’s handsome looks, big beaming smile and brown eyes, glistening with warmth and playfulness, must have cut instantly through my mother’s natural shyness. Their romance remained a secret for their first year together. Although they both came from a Creole background in Louisiana, my father’s darker skin disqualified him as a suitor in my maternal grandfather’s opinion. He didn’t want his daughter to date anyone outside of their community of light-skinned Creoles. When the two men were first introduced, my grandfather refused to shake my father’s hand, and in a fit of dramatic fury threatened to kill my mother if she continued to date him. They went on seeing each other despite my grandfather’s violent reaction. As an older child, I heard my grandfather say repeatedly, “The blacks are nothing but trouble, and the whites are not much better.” And my grandmother liked to often remind me of my Creole status: “You have dark skin, but you’re still Creole. It says on your birth certificate: Mother, Creole; Father, Negro.” Their deep obsession with ethnicity and internalized racism mystified me as a girl. In Synanon, race was not an issue. I realized my grandparents’ ethnocentric focus was a reaction to a foregone time of strict societal segregation and the danger of passing for white in the Jim Crow South. In the 1930s, a black man’s life in Louisiana was worth little. A duck hunter in his youth, my grandfather on occasion found the body of a black man suspended from a cypress tree or floating on the still waters, murdered and left to rot in the hushed swelter of the swamps. According to my father, Theresa’s beauty and fairer skin immediately pleased his mother, and over time my grandfather warmed to my father, as most did, for he had a sunny, charismatic disposition. My parents dated for three years. During that time, new ideas that Theresa wanted to explore—Eastern spirituality, meditation, awareness groups and psychology—swept through American society. When she tried to talk to my father about her interests, the topics seemed too foreign for him to grasp. He couldn’t relate to the “strange” concepts she brought up, notions like “money has no real value” and “Catholicism is dying and people don’t need it to experience spirituality.” To a deeply Catholic man who aspired to have millions of dollars one day, this was “crazy talk.” As Theresa gradually lost interest in the American status quo, my father continued to embrace mainstream values.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Walking Around begins, It so happens I am sick of being a man…I am sick of my hair and my eyes and my teeth and my shadows …At one point he says , Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily, or kill a nun with a blow on the ear. Kill a nun! Katie Butke called out—whether in outrage or enthusiasm, I couldn’t tell. The poem ends with wash on the line from which slow dirty tears are falling . Once I stopped, there was a collective sigh, like the pneumatic sound of an engine giving up. A big silence held us. Then applause broke out. Feet were stomped. A few ladies got up to hug each other again. If there’d been pillows, they’d have all started whacking each other. What did the guy feel who wrote it? I asked. Every hand shot up, but Katie Butke slapped the side of my boot. I pointed to her. Happy? she said. A few ladies agreed. But a forest of white hands kept flapping. The recalcitrant Marion Pinski crossed her short white arms across her front, but I called on her anyway. The shirts, she said in a murmur. The shirts are crying. Sad. The shirts are dirty. The shirts didn’t get washed right. The shirts are crying. The man doesn’t want Monday. We broke into small groups, and as I copied down their words, they marveled at my pen’s passage across the lines. That’s me? a lady named Dawn asked, touching the letters. That’s my name? I kept a copy of the poem Katie Butke wrote that day. It’s called Monkey Face . Every poem Katie wrote was called Monkey Face —a phrase no doubt imprinted on her in ways I hate to think about. Far away St. Paul People like robots Wash their tables Scrub the floor Bored thing s Washrags on the window Put it away now Look at your leg Tie your shoe. Look At yourself. A monkey. One line of Marion Pinski’s still pricks me with fresh envy: I get to dance with the deep boys and the day boys . (A Buddhist friend would later tell me that Marion was a bodhisattva sent to show me how comical my artistic pretentions were.) When I gave a local poetry reading—in addition to the Minks and a few local writers—the women came on a bus, and Katie Butke leaped up, shouting with a gospel singer’s conviction, You a monkey face . (To date, my truest review.) They clapped wildly after every poem. Katie Butke even stood up a few times, taking an operatic from-the-hip bow. The unchecked emotion they embodied was exactly what Etheridge was trying to drag out of me for my poser’s pages. It drove him crazy how I’d stick in fancy names and references I thought sounded clever. Etheridge used a pen to poke the fedora back on his head.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  time as a couple. Intrigued, I read on to learn that they had married some years ago when she was in her early twenties and he was close to fifty. However, Jud was only one of several husbands to his much younger wife, and, in addition, there were other wives who shared in their “Best- Friend Identity Cluster,” or B-FIC. Apparently, theirs was the first B-FIC to form in the community. The young woman’s enthusiasm for Jud and her other marriage partners seemed to gush off the page. She explained how one day it occurred to her that it would be “far out” to form, like, a group of lovers. Jud, who had been instrumental in starting the community, thought that she and a few of the others were onto something. It had been difficult at times for all of them in overcoming their societal conditioning toward monogamy, but they were all committed and faithful to each other. They invented the word “polyfidelity” to explain their arrangement and, over time, the original B-FIC had grown from a handful of members. I glanced at the happy couple on the cover of the brochure again. The woman had married someone far, far older than herself, like my first-grade teacher, Jenny, in Synanon. Just a few months after Betty, the wife of founder Chuck, had passed away from cancer, Chuck had begun dating again. Jenny had announced to my class on a spring morning that she would be out of town the following week because she had a date with Chuck. Why Jenny had wanted to date someone who could possibly pass for her grandfather had been a mystery to me, and this strange union between this young woman and her much older husband I found just as baffling and, frankly, gross. Where did all of this B-FIC business leave Sara and me? I wondered while I rummaged through the booklets. If people were married in groups, where did the kids live? I saw nothing in the literature about how the children were housed. When I’d lived in Synanon, I had stayed in dormitories with other kids, separate from the adults’ quarters. Men and women called demonstrators took care of us children and acted as role models of the exemplary Synanonite. Parents had been discouraged from

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  She explained how one day it occurred to her that it would be “far out” to form, like, a group of lovers. Jud, who had been instrumental in starting the community, thought that she and a few of the others were onto something. It had been difficult at times for all of them in overcoming their societal conditioning toward monogamy, but they were all committed and faithful to each other. They invented the word “polyfidelity” to explain their arrangement and, over time, the original B-FIC had grown from a handful of members. I glanced at the happy couple on the cover of the brochure again. The woman had married someone far, far older than herself, like my first-grade teacher, Jenny, in Synanon. Just a few months after Betty, the wife of founder Chuck, had passed away from cancer, Chuck had begun dating again. Jenny had announced to my class on a spring morning that she would be out of town the following week because she had a date with Chuck. Why Jenny had wanted to date someone who could possibly pass for her grandfather had been a mystery to me, and this strange union between this young woman and her much older husband I found just as baffling and, frankly, gross. Where did all of this B-FIC business leave Sara and me? I wondered while I rummaged through the booklets. If people were married in groups, where did the kids live? I saw nothing in the literature about how the children were housed. When I’d lived in Synanon, I had stayed in dormitories with other kids, separate from the adults’ quarters. Men and women called demonstrators took care of us children and acted as role models of the exemplary Synanonite. Parents had been discouraged from spending too much time with their offspring, based on Chuck’s distorted view that parental influence psychologically poisoned children. I discovered an example of a sleeping arrangement for a B-FIC in a different Kerista booklet. It was not unlike trying to figure out a complicated subway schedule. The women appeared to stay in the same rooms and were visited by their different husbands according to some hierarchy of who came to the commune when. The husbands bed hopped every night to the different rooms, and it appeared that some of the wives resided in different buildings. I set the schedule down after getting lost on the second week in the month and stared at Sara, biting my lip. She sat in a corner by herself, her knees drawn up, clutching an Archie comic. Her short, dark hair was slick and straight on some parts of her head, but rose up spiky in other sections. Still flat chested, with a husky build, her body was a curve-less block of musculature that contained a wide waist extending to straight hips, and on down to thick, stout legs.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Theresa was twenty years old, with a slim, petite figure, fine features, greenish eyes and dark shoulder-length hair, a Natalie Wood look-alike. When my father, Jim, first glimpsed her, he told me he thought he’d witnessed an angel. He spent the next hour at the club searching for the elusive beauty. When a friend talked him into meeting a particular girl later that evening, he reluctantly agreed. The girl turned out to be Theresa. My father’s handsome looks, big beaming smile and brown eyes, glistening with warmth and playfulness, must have cut instantly through my mother’s natural shyness. Their romance remained a secret for their first year together. Although they both came from a Creole background in Louisiana, my father’s darker skin disqualified him as a suitor in my maternal grandfather’s opinion. He didn’t want his daughter to date anyone outside of their community of light-skinned Creoles. When the two men were first introduced, my grandfather refused to shake my father’s hand, and in a fit of dramatic fury threatened to kill my mother if she continued to date him. They went on seeing each other despite my grandfather’s violent reaction. As an older child, I heard my grandfather say repeatedly, “The blacks are nothing but trouble, and the whites are not much better.” And my grandmother liked to often remind me of my Creole status: “You have dark skin, but you’re still Creole. It says on your birth certificate: Mother, Creole; Father, Negro.” Their deep obsession with ethnicity and internalized racism mystified me as a girl. In Synanon, race was not an issue. I realized my grandparents’ ethnocentric focus was a reaction to a foregone time of strict societal segregation and the danger of passing for white in the Jim Crow South. In the 1930s, a black man’s life in Louisiana was worth little. A duck hunter in his youth, my grandfather on occasion found the body of a black man suspended from a cypress tree or floating on the still waters, murdered and left to rot in the hushed swelter of the swamps. According to my father, Theresa’s beauty and fairer skin immediately pleased his mother, and over time my grandfather warmed to my father, as most did, for he had a sunny, charismatic disposition. My parents dated for three years. During that time, new ideas that Theresa wanted to explore—Eastern spirituality, meditation, awareness groups and psychology—swept through American society. When she tried to talk to my father about her interests, the topics seemed too foreign for him to grasp. He couldn’t relate to the “strange” concepts she brought up, notions like “money has no real value” and “Catholicism is dying and people don’t need it to experience spirituality.” To a deeply Catholic man who aspired to have millions of dollars one day, this was “crazy talk.” As Theresa gradually lost interest in the American status quo, my father continued to embrace mainstream values.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  παρηορία, 7, in pl. side-traces, i.e. the traces by which the maphopos was attached beside the regular pair (cf. mapnopos), ἵπποιο mapnopias ἀπέταμνε 1]. 8.87; ἐν δὲ παρηορίῃσι .. Πήδασον ἵει he harnessed Pedasus with side-traces, 16, 152. II. the side of anything, as of a river, Arat. 600. TAPNOPLOS, a, ον, V. 56. Tapyopos (not mapyopos), Dor. παράοροξ, ov, the latter form always in Trag., in late Poets also παρηόριος, ov: (παραείρω, cf. συνήορος, μετήορος = μετέωροϑὴ) :—joined or hung beside: hence παρήορος (sc. ἵππος) a horse which draws by the side of the regular pair (€vvwpis), an outrigger, elsewhere παράσειρος, σειραφόρος, Il. 16. 471, 474; cf. ma- pnopia. II. lying along, outstretched, sprawling, ἔκειτο παρή- opos ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα ll. 7.156; ἀχρεῖον καὶ παράορον δέμας κεῖται Aesch. Pr. 363 :—so, of a ship, παρηορίην κόπτεν ῥόος drave it out to sea, Ap. Rh. 4. 943. III. metaph. (from the fact that the ἵππος 7. was given to prancing and the like), reckless, distraught, senseless, οὔτι παρήορος οὐδ᾽ ἀεσίφρων Il. 23. 603; π. ὄμμα τιταίνειν Tryph. 371; so, παρηόριον νόημα Anth, P. 9. 603 :—in Archil. 51, νόου παρήορος wander- ing from one’s senses :—Theocr. 15. 8 has a Dor. form πάραροξς in this sense ; and Hesych. gives παρηρία " μωρία, and παραρεῖν - φληναφεῖν, —Cf. παραείρω. παρήπᾶφε, v. sub παραπαφίσκω. παρήϑ, contr. for mapyis. παρησύὕχάζω, to pass over in silence, Philo 1. 93, cf. 504. παρηχέομαι, Dep. to resemble in sound, τινι Schol. Ar. Pl. 885 ; πρός τι Eust. 139. 31; 7. ἔκ τινος to be derived from a word by such resem- blance, Id. 87. 24. ΤΙ. 1ο be dissonant, Greg. Nyss. παρήχησις, ἡ, likeness of sound, alliteration, Hermog., Suid., etc. ; so, παρήχημα, τό, Suid. :—Adj., παρηχητικός, 7, dv, alliterative, Id.; Adv. πκῶς, Eust. 1638.17: cf. Meineke Com. Fragm. 3. p. 618. παρθέμενος, v. sub παρατίθημι. παρθενεία, ἡ, maidenhood, virginity, Eur. Heracl. 592, Tro. 980; also παρθενία Pind. I. 8. 95, Aesch. Pr. 898, Eur. Phoen. 1487, Arist. Probl. Bet 5y. saute τά, ν. sub παρθένια. παρθένειος, Ion. and poét. --ηἴος, ον, of or belonging to a maiden, π. yAépapa Pind. N. 8.3; αἰὼν π. the maiden’s life, Aesch. Ag. 229; 7. λέχος. etc., Eur. Tro. 671, etc.:—cf. παρθένιος. παρθένευμα, τό, in pl. the pursuits or amusements of maidens, Eur. Phoen. 1265 ; so in sing., a maiden’s work, Id. Ion 1425. 2. νοθὸν m. the child of an unmarried woman (cf, παρθένιος 1. 2), Ib. 1472. παρθένευσιξ, ἡ, = παρθενεία, Luc. Salt. 44. παρθενεύω, (παρθένος) to bring up as a maid, παρθ. παῖδας ἐν δόμοις καλῶς Eur. Supp. 452, cf. Luc. D. Marin. 12.1, etc. :—Pass. to lead a maiden life, remain a maiden, Hdt. 3.124, Aesch. Pr. 648, Eur. Phoen. 1637; πολιὰ (neut. pl.) παρθενεύεται grows gray in maidenhood, Id. Hel. 283. 2. intr. in Act.,=Pass., Heliod. 7. 8, etc. παρθενεών, ὥνος, 6, Ion. for παρθενών, q. ν. παρθενία, ἡ, --παρθενεία, q. Vv. II. an old name of Samos, Arist. Fr. 529.