Confusion

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)

  The true opposite of belief, psychologically considered, are doubt and inquiry, not disbelief. In both these states the content of our mind is in unrest, and the emotion engendered thereby is, like the emotion of belief itself, perfectly distinct, but perfectly indescribable in words. Both sorts of emotion may be pathologically exalted. One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more 'utterly utter' than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man s very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.[298] The pathological state opposed to this solidity and deepening has been called the questioning mania (Grübelsucht by the Germans). It is sometimes found as a substantive affection, paroxysmal or chronic, and consists in the inability to rest in any conception, and the need of having it confirmed and explained 'Why do I stand here where I stand?' 'Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair' 'How is it that men are only of the size they are? Why not as big as houses,' etc., etc.[299] There is, it is true, another pathological state which is as far removed from doubt as from belief, and which some may prefer to consider the proper contrary of the latter state of mind. I refer to the feeling that everything is hollow, unreal, dead. I shall speak of this state again upon a later page. The point I wish to notice here is simply that belief and disbelief are but two aspects of one psychic state. John Mill, reviewing various opinions about belief, comes to the conclusion that no account of it can be given:

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

  Now for the next step in our construction of real space: How are the various sense-spaces added together into a consolidated and unitary continuum? For they are, in man at all events, incoherent at the start. Here again the first fact that appears is that primitively our space-experiences form a chaos, out of which we have no immediate faculty for extricating them. Objects of different sense-organs, experienced together, do not in the first instance appear either inside or alongside or far outside of each other, neither spatially continuous nor discontinuous, in any definite sense of these words. The same thing is almost as true of objects felt by different parts of the same organ before discrimination has done its finished work. The most we can say is that all our space-experiences together form an objective total and that this objective total is vast. Even now the space inside our mouth, which is so intimately known and accurately measured by its inhabitant the tongue, can hardly be said to have its internal directions and dimensions known in any exact relation to those of the larger world outside. It forms almost a little world by itself. Again, when the dentist excavates a small cavity in one of our teeth, we feel the hard point of his instrument scraping, in distinctly differing directions, a surface which seems to our sensibility vaguely larger than the subsequent use of the mirror tells us it 'really' is. And though the directions of the scraping differ so completely inter se, not one of them can be identified with the particular direction in the outer world to which it corresponds. The space of the tooth-sensibility is thus really a little world by itself, which can only become congruent with the outer space world by farther experiences which shall alter its bulk, identify its directions, fuse its margins, and finally embed it as a definite part within a definite whole. And even though every joint's rotations should be felt to vary inter se as so many differences of direction in a common room; even though the same were true of diverse tracings on the skin, and of diverse tracings on the retina respectively, it would still not follow that feelings of direction, on these different surfaces, are intuitively comparable among each other, or with the other directions yielded by the feelings of the semi-circular canals. It would not follow that we should immediately judge the relations of them all to each other in one space-world.

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

  With the feelings of accommodation it is very much the same. Donders has shown[234] that the apparent magnifying power of spectacles of moderate convexity hardly depends at all upon their enlargement of the retinal image, but rather on the relaxation they permit of the muscle of accommodation. This suggests an object farther off, and consequently a much larger one, since its retinal size rather increases than diminishes. But in this case the same vacillation of judgment as in the previously mentioned case of convergence takes place. The recession made the object seem larger, but the apparent growth in size of the object now makes it look as if it came nearer instead of receding. The effect thus contradicts its own cause. Everyone is conscious, on first putting on a pair of spectacles, of a doubt whether the field of view draws near or retreats.[235] There is still another deception, occurring in persons who have had one eye-muscle suddenly paralyzed has led Wundt to affirm that the eyeball-feeling proper, the incoming sensation of effected rotation, tells us only of the direction of our eye-movements, but not of their whole extent.[236] For this reason, and because not only Wundt, but many other authors, think the phenomena in these partial paralyses demonstrate the existence of a feeling of innervation, a feeling of the outgoing nervous current, opposed to every different sensation whatever, it seems proper to note the facts with a certain degree of detail.

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

  He was very weak, having lost apparently over twenty pounds of flesh during his escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the candy-store that he refused to set foot in it again. The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as he had no memory, after he had once resumed his normal personality, of any part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him after he left home. The remarkable part of the change is, of course, the peculiar occupation which the so-called Brown indulged in. Mr. Bourne has never in his life had the slightest contract with trade. 'Brown' was described by the neighbors as taciturn, orderly in his habits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times; replenished his stock; cooked for himself in the back shop, where he also slept; went regularly to church; and once at a prayer-meeting made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course of which he related an incident which he had witnessed in his natural state of Bourne. This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890, when I induced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism, so as to see whether, in the hypnotic trance, his 'Brown' memory would not come back. It did so with surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite impossible to make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the facts of his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't know as he had ever met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he said that he had "never seen the woman before," etc. On the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight,[316] and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself. He gives no motive for the wandering except that there was 'trouble back there' and he 'wanted rest.' During the trance he looks old, the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits screening his eyes and trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm all hedged in," he says: "I can't get out at either end. I don't know what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I ever left that store, or what became of it."

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

  2) There is between imagined objects and felt objects a difference of conscious quality which may be called almost absolute. It is hardly possible to confound the liveliest image of fancy with the weakest real sensation. The felt object has a plastic reality and outwardness which the imagined object wholly lacks. Moreover, as Fechner says, in imagination the attention feels as if drawn backwards to the brain; in sensation (even of after-images) it is directed forward towards the sense-organ.[82] The difference between the two processes feels like one of kind, and not like a mere 'more' or 'less' of the same.[83] If a sensation of sound were only a strong imagination, and an imagination a weak sensation, there ought to be a border-line of experience where we never could tell whether we were hearing a weak sound or imagining a strong one. In comparing a present sensation felt with a past one imagined, it will be remembered that we often judge the imagined one to have been the stronger (see above, p. 500, note). This is inexplicable if the imagination be simply a weaker excitement of the sensational process. To 2): The difference alleged is not absolute, and sensation and imagination are hard to discriminate where the sensation is so weak as to be just perceptible. At night hearing a very faint striking of the hour by a far-off clock, our imagination reproduces both rhythm and sound, and it is often difficult to tell which was the last real stroke. So of a baby crying in a distant part of the house, we are uncertain whether we still hear it, or only imagine the sound. Certain violin-players take advantage of this in diminuendo terminations. After the pianissimo has been reached they continue to bow as if still playing, but are careful not to touch the strings. The listener hears in imagination a degree of sound fainter still than the preceding pianissimo. This phenomenon is not confined to hearing: "If we slowly approach our finger to a surface of water, we often deceive ourselves about the moment in which the wetting occurs. The apprehensive patient believes himself to feel the knife of the surgeon whilst it is still at some distance."[84] Visual perception supplies numberless instances in which the same sensation of vision is perceived as one object or another according to the interpretation of the mind. Many of these instances will come before us in the course of the next two chapters; and in Chapter XIX similar illusions will be described in the other senses. Taken together, all these facts would force us to admit that the subjective difference between imagined and felt objects is less absolute than has been claimed, and that the cortical processes which underlie imagination and sensation are not quite as discrete as one at first is tempted to suppose. That peripheral sensory processes are ordinarily involved in imagination seems improbable; that they may sometimes be aroused from the cortex downwards cannot, however, be dogmatically denied.

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

  "My ability to form mental images seems, from what I have studied of other people's images, to be defective, and somewhat peculiar. The process by which I seem to remember any particular event is not by x series of distinct images, but a sort of panorama, the faintest impressions of which are perceptible through a thick fog.—I cannot shut my eyes and get a distinct image of anyone, although I used to be able to a few years ago, and the faculty seems to have gradually slipped away.—In my most vivid dreams, where the events appear like the most real facts, I am often troubled with dimness of sight which causes the images to appear indistinct.—To come to the question of the breakfast-table, there is nothing definite about it. Everything is vague. I cannot say what I see. I could not possibly count the chairs, but I happen to know that there are ten. I see nothing in detail.—The chief thing is in general impression that I cannot tell exactly what I do see. The coloring is about the same, as far as I can recall it, only very much washed out. Perhaps the only color I can see at all distinctly is that of the tablecloth, and I could probably see the color of the wall-paper if I could remember what color it was." A person whose visual imagination is strong finds it hard to understand how those who are without the faculty can think at all. Some people undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the name,[61] and instead of seeing their breakfast-table, they tell you that they remember it or know what was on it. This knowing and remembering takes place undoubtedly by means of verbal images, as was explained already in Chapter IX, pp. 265-6. The study of Aphasia (see p. 54) has of late years shown how unexpectedly great are the differences between individuals in respect of imagination. And at the same time the discrepancies between lesion and symptom in different cases of the disease have been largely cleared up. In some individuals the habitual 'thought-stuff,' if one may so call it, is visual; in others it is auditory, articulatory, or motor; in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed. The same local cerebral injury must needs work different practical results in persons who differ in this way. In one it will throw a much used brain-tract out of gear; in the other it may affect an unimportant region. A particularly instructive case was published by Charcot in 1883.[62] The patient was

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  entertaining and instructive spat occurred some years ago in a British literary journal over the use of the word ‘queer’, which much offended a former activist in the Gay Liberation Front when freely deployed in a positive sense by a later generation of scholars. One of the latter ended his riposte to the complainant with the lapidary remark that ‘Language moves quickly...Trying to nail it down to one particular moment in the 1970s is like standing in a river, yelling at it to stop.’ [28] Current fluidity of language is one reason for the wide contemporary use of the stopgap descriptive acronym LGBTQ (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer or Questioning), often with an extra initial, plus-sign or asterisk to signify further openness. Aware of the linguistic river’s likely further eddies, I deploy this currently useful signifier fairly minimally; it does have a faute de mieux usefulness in the varied sexual identities that are emerging in our own time. I am also dissatisfied with the imprecision (and sometimes downright literary pretentiousness) of the signifier ‘queer’, and I likewise employ it minimally in this book. I am admittedly attracted to a shape given to its definition by the visual historian Elspeth H. Brown, as ‘oppositional space to dominant norms’, but that still seems to leave unanswered too many questions about the assumptions of the observer about dominance, opposition and norms to make ‘queer’ especially useful for historical purposes. [29] The swamp becomes still more treacherous in the lively (and often angry) current debate on the distinction between sex and gender. Those terms themselves disrupt the traditional Judaeo-Christian mantra that ‘male and female created He them’, which is in any case not quite what it might at first sight seem: ‘male and female’ in the text is not as categorical a statement of differentiation as a more precise ‘male or female’ would be. In any case, the word ‘gender’ is an English borrowing from its strictly limited, originally linguistic usage in relation to grammar. There are many languages (not English) that have their nouns differentiated by ‘gender’, and sometimes in confusing ways, so that French speaks of la sentinelle, with ‘feminine’ gender endings, even though the person concerned, a military sentinel on duty, has traditionally been a male soldier. German gives ‘neutral’ gender in grammatical terms to a young lady who is definitely female in every other way: das Mädchen. Beyond this extension of strictly technical terms into emotionally charged wider usage, we can no longer see ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in everyday life as so easily distinguishable as they seemed a few decades ago. ‘Sex’ might seem more easily definable than ‘gender’: surely ‘sex’ is a matter of a few swift appraising glances at genitalia? That could be followed up by references to one of the functions of biological sex, which is to lead to procreation: a matter to which we will return repeatedly in this book.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I return to the books. Eye each one. My hand lingers over Knotted briefly, before settling on the unnamed pile. I’ll start right here. [image file=image37.jpg] I read the book. Without the pages numbered, I am forced to read pell-mell. It’s like jumping backwards into a snowdrift and not knowing how deeply you’re going to sink. My life has always been filled with order, until I was taken and set aside to rot in this place. This place is chaos, and reading with no order is chaos. I hate it and yet I am too enslaved by the words to desist. The book is about a girl named Ophelia. On the very first page I read, which could be 5 or 500, Ophelia has been forced to give her premature baby up for adoption. Not by her parents, as most stories go, but by her controlling, schizophrenic husband. Her husband is a musician who writes what the voices tell him to write. So, when the voices tell him to give his five-pound baby girl away, he strong-arms Ophelia by threatening both her and her baby’s life. On the next page I pick up, Ophelia is a girl of twelve. She is eating a meal with her parents. It appears to be a normal family meal, but Ophelia’s inner dialogue is riddled with the kind of markers that herald a girl both strange and strangely old. She is angry with her parents for existing, for being such simple contributors to society. She compares them to her mashed potatoes then goes on to talk about their failed attempts to replace her with another baby. My mother has had four miscarriages. I’d take that as God’s way of saying you aren’t supposed to fuck up any more kids. I cringe at this part, wanting to know more about Carol Blithe’s broken uterus, but my page has come to an end, and I am forced to pick up a new one. It goes like this for hours, as I gather bursts of information about Ophelia, who almost seems like the anti-heroine. Ophelia is a narcissist; Ophelia has a superiority complex; Ophelia can’t stick with anything for too long before becoming bored. Ophelia marries a man who is the antithesis of boring, and she pays for it. She leaves him eventually, and marries someone else, but then she leaves him, too. I find a page where she speaks about a china doll that she had to leave behind after divorcing her second husband. She laments the loss of the china doll in the most peculiar way. I gather these details until my brain is hurting. I am trying to sort through all of it, put it in order, when I come across the last page. She is self- actuating on the last page of the book. When I reach the final line, my eyes cross. You will feel me in the fall I vomit.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  They had kept together for some time, when Louisa, meeting an old acquaintance of hers, very cordially gives her companion the slip, and leaves her under the protection of her boy’s habit, which was not much, and of her discretion, which was, it seems, still less. Emily, finding herself deserted, sauntered thoughtless about a while, and, as much for coolness and air as any thing else, at length pulled off her mask and went to the sideboard; where, eyed and marked out by a gentleman in a very handsome domino, she was accosted by, and fell into chat with him. The domino, after a little discourse, in which Emily doubtless distinguished her good nature and easiness more than her wit, began to make violent love to her, and drawing her insensibly to some benches at the lower end of the masquerade room, got her to sit by him, where he squeezed her hands, pinched her cheeks, praised and played with her fine hair, admired her complexion, and all in a style of courtship dashed with a certain oddity, that not comprehending the mystery of, poor Emily attributed to his falling in with the humour of her disguise; and being naturally not the cruellest of her profession, began to incline to a parley on those essentials. But here was the stress of the joke: he took her really for what she appeared to be, a smock-faced boy; and she, forgetting her dress, and of course ranging quite wide of his ideas, took all those address to be paid to herself as a woman, which she precisely owed to his not thinking her one. However, this double error was pushed to such a height on both sides, that Emily, who saw nothing in him but a gentleman of distinction by those points of dress to which his disguise did not extend, warmed too by the wine he had plyed her with, and the caresses he had lavished upon her, suffered herself to be persuaded to go to a bagnio with him; and thus, losing sight of Mrs. Cole’s cautions, with a blind confidence, put herself into his hands, to be carried wherever he pleased. For his part, equally blinded by his wishes, whilst here gregious simplicity favoured his deception more than the most exquisite art could have done, he supposed, no doubt, that he had lighted on some soft simpleton, fit for his; purpose, or some kept minion broken to his hand, who understood him perfectly well, and entered into his designs. But, be that as it would, he led her to a coach, went into it with her, and brought her to a very handsome apartment, with a bed in it; but whether it was a bagnio or not, she could not tell, having spoken to nobody but himself.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  And none but children can believe it. To talk of loving a man or woman for life is like saying that a candle can burn forever.” “But you are talking of physical love. Do you not admit a love based upon a conformity of ideals, on a spiritual affinity?” “Why not? But in that case it is not necessary to procreate together (excuse my brutality). The point is that this conformity of ideals is not met among old people, but among young and pretty persons,” said he, and he began to laugh disagreeably. “Yes, I affirm that love, real love, does not consecrate marriage, as we are in the habit of believing, but that, on the contrary, it ruins it.” “Permit me,” said the lawyer. “The facts contradict your words. We see that marriage exists, that all humanity —at least the larger portion—lives conjugally, and that many husbands and wives honestly end a long life together.” The nervous gentleman smiled ill-naturedly. “And what then? You say that marriage is based upon love, and when I give voice to a doubt as to the existence of any other love than sensual love, you prove to me the existence of love by marriage. But in our day marriage is only a violence and falsehood.” “No, pardon me,” said the lawyer. “I say only that marriages have existed and do exist.” “But how and why do they exist? They have existed, and they do exist, for people who have seen, and do see, in marriage something sacramental, a sacrament that is binding before God. For such people marriages exist, but to us they are only hypocrisy and violence. We feel it, and, to clear ourselves, we preach free love; but, really, to preach free love is only a call backward to the promiscuity of the sexes (excuse me, he said to the lady), the haphazard sin of certain raskolniks. The old foundation is shattered; we must build a new one, but we must not preach debauchery.” He grew so warm that all became silent, looking at him in astonishment. “And yet the transition state is terrible. People feel that haphazard sin is inadmissible. It is necessary in some way or other to regulate the sexual relations; but there exists no other foundation than the old one, in which nobody longer believes? People marry in the old fashion, without believing in what they do, and the result is falsehood, violence. When it is falsehood alone, it is easily endured. The husband and wife simply deceive the world by professing to live monogamically. If they really are polygamous and polyandrous, it is bad, but acceptable.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “You’ve said those words to me so many times I’ve lost count. But this time it’s not my choice. I want to be with my wife. Planning for our baby. Not locked up like a prisoner with you. I don’t want to be with you.” His words hurt so bad. My pride keeps my knees stiff, otherwise I would have buckled from the pain. I watch him walk up the stairs, my heart pounding to the beat of his anger. I guess I was wrong about him. I was wrong about so many things with regard to him. I am wrapped in my cocoon again when Isaac comes up with dinner. He brings two plates and sets them on the floor by the fire before unwrapping me. “Food,” he says. I lay on my back staring up at the ceiling for a minute, before throwing my legs off the side of the bed and slowly walking to his picnic. He’s already eating, staring at the flames while he chews. I sit on my knees as far away from him as I can—on the corner of the rug—and pick up my plate. The plate is square. There are squares around its edge. It’s the first time I’m noticing. I’ve been eating off these dishes for weeks, but I’m just now observing things like color and pattern and shape. They are familiar to me. I touch one of the squares with my pinkie. “Isaac, these plates…” “I know,” he says. “You’re in a fog, Senna. I wish you’d wake up and help me get out of here.” I set my plate on the floor. He’s right. “The fence. How far does it run around the house?” “About a mile in every direction. With the cliff on one side of us.” “Why did he give us that much room?” “Food,” Isaac says. “Wood?” “So he means for us to take care of ourselves when the food runs out?” “Yes.” “But the fence will keep the animals out, and there are only so many trees to cut down.” Isaac shrugs. “Maybe he intended for us to make it ‘til summer. We’d see some animals then.” “There is a summer here?” I say it sarcastically, but Isaac nods. “There is a short summer in Alaska, yes. But depending on where we are, there might not be one. If we are in the mountains it will be winter year round.” I don’t long for the sun. I never have. But I don’t like being told it has to be winter all year either. It makes me want to claw at the walls. I fidget with the hem of my sweater. “How much food do we have left?” “Couple months’ worth if we ration it.”

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He goes on shaving. Suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, he begins to talk—disconnectedly at first, and then more and more clearly, emphatically, resolutely. It’s a struggle to get it out, but he seems determined to relate everything; he acts as if he were getting something off his conscience. He even reminds me of the look he gave me as he was going up the elevator shaft. He dwells on that lingeringly, as though to imply that everything were contained in that last moment, as though, if he had the power to alter things, he would never have put foot outside the elevator. She was in her dressing sack when he called. There was a bucket of champagne on the dresser. The room was rather dark and her voice was lovely. He gives me all the details about the room, the champagne, how the garçon opened it, the noise it made, the way her dressing sack rustled when she came forward to greet him—he tells me everything but what I want to hear. It was about eight when he called on her. At eight-thirty he was nervous, thinking about the job. “It was about nine when I called you, wasn’t it?” he says. “Yes, about that.” “I was nervous, see. …” “I know that. Go on. …” I don’t know whether to believe him or not, especially after those letters we concocted. I don’t even know whether I’ve heard him accurately, because what he’s telling me sounds utterly fantastic. And yet it sounds true too, knowing the sort of guy he is. And then I remember his voice over the telephone, that strange mixture of fright and jubilation. But why isn’t he more jubilant now? He keeps smiling all the time, smiling like a rosy little bedbug that has had its fill. “It was nine o’clock,” he says once again, “when I called you up, wasn’t it?” I nod my head wearily. Yes, it was nine o’clock. He is certain now that it was nine o’clock because he remembers having taken out his watch. Anyway, when he looked at his watch again it was ten o’clock. At ten o’clock she was lying on the divan with her boobies in her hands. That’s the way he gives it to me—in driblets. At eleven o’clock it was all settled; they were going to run away, to Borneo. Fuck the husband! She never loved him anyway. She would never have written the first letter if the husband wasn’t old and passionless. “And then she says to me: ‘But listen, dear, how do you know you won’t get tired of me?’” At this I burst out laughing. This sounds preposterous to me, I can’t help it. “And you said?” “What did you expect me to say?

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “This is a bughouse,” says Van Norden, smiling distressedly. It is such a faint, indescribable smile that for a moment the dream feeling comes back and it seems to me that we are standing at the end of a long corridor at the end of which is a corrugated mirror. And down this corridor, swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door opens and a hand yanks him, or a hoof pushes him out. And the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet and slippery. In and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his valise there is only a toothbrush inside. In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he’s so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels. Meanwhile the luggage is being hauled in. And things begin to look crazier even than before—particularly when he attaches his exerciser to the bedstead and begins his Sandow exercises. “I like this place,” he says, smiling at the garçon . He takes his coat and vest off. The garçon is watching him with a puzzled air; he has a valise in one hand and the douche bag in the other. I’m standing apart in the antechamber holding the mirror with the green gauze. Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn. It is exactly the same sort of sensation which I get when I enter the Comédie-Française or the Palais-Royal Theatre; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it’s like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there’s no room in the valise. Climbing up the stairs, as I said a moment ago, he had mentioned the fact that Maupassant used to live here. The coincidence seems to have made an impression upon him. He would like to believe that it was in this very room that Maupassant gave birth to some of those gruesome tales on which his reputation rests. “They lived like pigs, those poor bastards,” he says.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Martha, who was an arch-jade, and, being used to this decoy, had her cue perfect, made me a kind of half curtsy, and asked me to walk up with her; and accordingly showed me a neat room, two pair of stairs backwards, in which there was a handsome bed, where Martha told me I was to lie with a young gentlewoman, a cousin of my mistress, who she was sure would be vastly good to me. Then she ran out into such affected encomiums on her good mistress! her sweet mistress! and how happy I was to light upon her! and that I could not have bespoke a better; with other the like gross stuff, such as would itself have started suspicions in any but such an unpractised simpleton, who was perfectly new to life, and who took every word she said in the very sense she laid out for me to take it; but she readily saw what a penetration she had to deal with, and measured me very rightly in her manner of whistling to me, so as to make me pleased with my cage, and blind to the wires. In the midst of these false explanations of the nature of my future service, we were rung for down again, and I was reintroduced into the same parlour, where there was a table laid with three covers; and my mistress had now got with her one of her favourite girls, a notable manager of her house, and whose business it was to prepare and break such young fillies as I was to the mounting block; and she was accordingly, in that view, alloted me for a bed-fellow, and, to give her the more authority, she had the title of cousin conferred on her by the venerable president of this college. Here I underwent a second survey, which ended in the full approbation of Mrs. Phœbe Ayres, the name of my tutoress elect, to whose care and instruction I was affectionately recommended. Dinner was now set on table, and in pursuance of treating me as a companion, Mrs. Brown, with a tone to cut off all dispute, soon over-ruled my most humble and most confused protestations against sitting down with her Ladyship, which my very short breeding just suggested to me could not be right, or in the order of things. At table, the conversation was chiefly kept up by the two madams and carried on in double meaning expressions, interrupted every now and then by kind assurances to me, all tending to confirm and fix my satisfaction with my present condition: augment it they could not, so very a novice was I then.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and looked out at the trees behind my shoulder. I kept my eyes on his face so they wouldn’t wander to the ink on his arms. His tattoos confused me. They made me feel like I didn’t know him at all. “Twice. The love of my life, and now my soulmate.” I start. I was the writer; the worder of words—and I rarely used the beaten up idea of a soulmate. Love was sinned against too often for me to believe in that tired old concept. If someone loved you as much as they loved themselves, why did they cheat and break promises and lie? Wasn’t it in our nature to preserve ourselves? Shouldn’t we preserve our soul match with as much fervor? “You’re saying there is a difference between those two?” I ask. “Yes,” he said. He said it with so much conviction I almost believed him. “Who was she?” Isaac looked at me. “She was a bass player. An addict. Beautiful and dangerous.” The other Isaac, the one I don’t know, loved a woman who was very different from me. And now Doctor Isaac is saying he’s in love with me. As a rule, I try not to ask questions. It gives people a sense of friendship when you ask them things, and there is no getting rid of them. Since I can’t seem to get rid of Isaac anyway, I deem it safe to ask the most pressing question. The one that only he could answer. “Who were you?” It starts to rain. Not predictable Washington drizzle, but fast, fat bullets of water that explode when they hit the ground. Isaac grabs the bottom of his sweater and pulls it over his head. I stand very still even though I’m startled. He’s shirtless in front of me. “I was this,” he said. Most people marked themselves with scattered ideas: a heart, a word, a skull, a pirate woman with huge breasts—little parts that represented something. Isaac had one tattoo and it was continuous. A rope. It wound around his waist and chest, looped around his neck like a noose. It wrapped twice around each bicep before coming to an end right above the words I’ve seen poking out from underneath his sleeves. It was painful to look at. Uncomfortable. I understood. I knew what it was like to be bound. “I’m this now,” he said. He used two fingers to point to the words on his forearm. Die to Save My eyes go to his other arm. Save to Die “What does that mean?” Isaac looked at me closely, like he didn’t know if he should tell me. “A part of me had to die in order to save myself.” My eyes move to his left arm. Save to Die

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  There are sixty-three books scattered throughout the house. I’ve picked up each one, flipped through the pages, touched the numbers at the top right corners. I started reading two of them—both classics that I’ve already read—but I can’t get my mind to focus. I have twenty-three light, colorful sweaters, six pairs of jeans, six pairs of sweatpants, twelve pairs of socks, eighteen shirts, twelve pairs of yoga pants. One pair of rain boots—in Isaac’s size. There are six additional pieces of artwork on the walls, other than the F. Cayley; each of the others is by the Ukranian illusionist, Oleg Shuplyak. In the living room is “Sparrows” one of his milder pieces. But scattered across the rest of the house are the blurred faces of famous historical figures, blended almost indecipherably with landscapes. The one in the attic room disturbs me the most. I’ve tried to pry it from the wall with a butter knife, but it’s cemented so firmly I can’t get it to budge. It depicts a hooded man, his outstretched arms wielding two scythes. His mouth gapes and his eyes are two dark, empty holes. At first all you see is the eerie emptiness—the impending violence. Then your eyes adjust and the skull comes into view: the dark sockets of eyes between the scythes, the teeth, which seconds ago were simply a pattern on a garment. My kidnapper hung death in my bedroom. The sentiment makes me sick. The rest of the prints scattered throughout the house include: Hitler and the dragon, Freud and the lake, Darwin under the bridge with the mysterious cloaked figure. My least favorite is “Winter” in which a man is riding a yak over a snow-covered village while two eyes peer coldly at me. That one feels like a message. When I have counted everything in my closet and Isaac’s, I start counting things in the kitchen. I note the colors of the furniture and the walls. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I need to do something with my brain. When I run out of things to count, I talk to Isaac. He makes us coffee like he used to, and we sit at the table. “Why did you want to fly away on your red bike?” He raises his eyebrows. He’s not used to questions from me. “I don’t know anything about you,” I say. “You never seemed to want to.” That stings. It’s not entirely untrue. I have that whole stay the hell away from me thing going on. “I didn’t.” I count the kitchen cabinets. I forgot to do that. “Why not?” He spins his coffee cup in a circle, and lifts it to his mouth. Before he can take a sip he sets it down again. I have to take a moment to think about that one. “It’s just who I am.” “Because you choose to be?” “This conversation was supposed to be about you.”

• From Between Us

  All of this has profound implications for understanding the emotions of other people, particularly people from other cultures. We cannot assume that we simply understand someone’s emotions just by looking at their face, listening to their voice, or translating the emotion word they use to describe themselves. Bridging cultural differences in emotions will require you to do the hard work of unpacking the emotional episodes. Rather than projecting your own emotions onto others, you need to find out what the situation means to them—their context of reference: what they are moved to do, what their feelings and actions mean to the people around them (or what not feeling or acting the way they do would have meant to the same people). There is much to gain from this unpacking, as it can provide you with a valuable window into what is important in another person’s life, in their interactions, and in their communities. To take advantage of this window, we need to take seriously how they see and act upon the world, make sense from their point of view, and understand their actions from their strivings, and from the values and goals of their communities—not replace their perspective with our own. Unpacking emotional episodes means to humanize the people who live through them. Unpacking emotions in the heat of an emotional interaction is challenging. There is very little research on how to do it successfully, and yet, in our everyday lives, we take part in emotional interactions with partners who may not draw on the same repository, who might make different dance steps to a different musical genre. How to get in step? There is no easy trick, but the OURS perspective on emotions that I have introduced does shed some new light on how to do it. A first suggestion is to not assume you know or understand others’ emotions. Instead, slow down, ask questions, and listen. In the field of mental health care, this is called an attitude of “not knowing” or “cultural humility.” Try to stop yourself from drawing fast conclusions based on your own perspective, and check if you understand what it means to your interaction partner, and importantly, sustain a positive relationship while you do. Remember, this is difficult for almost everyone and it takes sustained practice. The second is to face up to your own feelings and acts. Remember that no emotion is any more “natural” than any other. There are no right and wrong emotions; there are only emotions that are right and wrong in a particular context, by particular standards. So, ask yourself what your own emotion wants to achieve, and how this may be different from the direction that your interaction partner’s emotion takes you. Ask yourself how you can act and feel differently. Can you find a dance that accommodates both? Can you end the emotional episode in a way that is right by both perspectives?

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  My mouth is dry. My tongue is sticking to the inside of my mouth. I try to shift it around—to the roof of my mouth, the inside of my cheeks, but it sticks, sticks, sticks. “You had a psychotic break. You tried to kill yourself.” “I would never,” I say. I love death. I think about it all the time, but to actually act out a suicide is unlike me. “You called me from yourrr home at three o’clock in the morrrning. You were delusional. You werrre starving yourself. Keeping yourrrself awake with pills. When they took you in you hadn’t slept in nine days. You were experiencing hallucinations, paranoia and memory lapses.” That’s not suicide, I think. But then I’m not so sure. I lift my hands off the top of the table where they are resting and hide them between my thighs. “You were saying one thing overrr and overrr when they brought you in. Do you rememberrr?” I make a noise in the back of my throat. If I ask her what I was saying I’m acknowledging that I believe her. And I don’t believe her. Except that I can hear screaming in my head. “Pink hippo,” she says. My throat constricts. The screaming gets louder. I want to reach up and put my hands over my ears to quell the sound. “No,” I say. “Yes, Senna. You were.” “No!” I slam my fist on the table. Saphira’s eyes grow large. “I was saying Zippo.” There is silence. All consuming, chilling, silence. I realize I was baited. The corners of her mouth curl up. “Ah, yes,” she says. “Z, for Zippo. My mistake.” It’s like I’ve just woken up from a dream—not a good one—just a dream that concealed a reality I’d somehow forgotten. I’m not freaking out, I’m not panicking. It feels as if I’m waking up from a long sleep. I’m compelled to stand and stretch my muscles. I hear the screaming again, but now it’s connected to a memory. I’m in a locked room. I’m not trying to get out. I don’t care about getting out. I’m just curled up on a metal cot, screaming. They can’t get me to stop. I’ve been like that for hours. I only stop when they sedate me, but as soon as the drugs wear off, I’m screaming again. “What made me stop screaming?” I ask her. My voice is so calm. I can’t remember everything. It’s all in pieces; smells and sounds and overwhelming emotions that were there at once, making me feel like I was about to implode. “Isaac.” I jar at the sound of his name. “What are you talking about?” “I called Isaac,” she says. “He came.” “Ohgodohgodohgod.” I bend over at the waist, hugging myself. I remember. I’ve been falling, and now I’ve finally hit the ground. Flashes of him coming into the room and climbing into the cot behind me. His arms wrapping around my body, until I stopped screaming.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I opened my MacBook and stared at the cursor. One hour, ten minutes, a day … I’m not sure how much time passed. The doorbell rang, jarring me. When did I come in here? I felt stiff as I stood up. A long time. I walked down the stairs and stopped in front of the door. Every one of my movements was robotic and forced. I could see Doctor Asterholder’s car through the peephole; charcoal sitting atop my wet, brick driveway. I opened the door and he blinked at me like this was normal—him being on my doorstep. He had both arms around paper bags loaded to the brim with groceries. He brought me groceries. “Why are you here?” “Because you are.” He stepped passed me and walked to the kitchen without my permission. I stood frozen for several minutes, looking at his car. It was drizzling outside, the sky covered in a thick fog that hung over the trees likes a burial shroud. When I finally closed the door, I was shivering. “Doctor Asterholder,” I said, walking into the kitchen. My kitchen. He was unpacking things on my counter: cans of tomato paste, boxes of rigatoni, bright yellow bananas and clear cartons of berries. “Isaac,” he corrected me. “Doctor Asterholder. I appreciate … I … but—” “Did you eat today?” He fished his soggy business card out of the sink and held it between two fingers. Not knowing what else to do, I wandered over to my barstool and took a seat. I wasn’t used to this sort of aggression. People gave me space, left me alone. Even if I asked them not to—which was rare. I didn’t want to be anyone’s project and I definitely didn’t want this man’s pity. But for the moment I had no words. I watched him open bottles and chop things. He took out his phone and set it on the counter and asked me if I minded. When I shook my head, he put it on. Her voice was raspy. It had both an old and new feel to it, innovative, classic.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Then she ran out into such affected encomiums on her good mistress! her sweet mistress! and how happy I was to light upon her! and that I could not have bespoke a better; with other the like gross stuff, such as would itself have started suspicions in any but such an unpractised simpleton, who was perfectly new to life, and who took every word she said in the very sense she laid out for me to take it; but she readily saw what a penetration she had to deal with, and measured me very rightly in her manner of whistling to me, so as to make me pleased with my cage, and blind to the wires. In the midst of these false explanations of the nature of my future service, we were rung for down again, and I was reintroduced into the same parlour, where there was a table laid with three covers; and my mistress had now got with her one of her favourite girls, a notable manager of her house, and whose business it was to prepare and break such young fillies as I was to the mounting block; and she was accordingly, in that view, alloted me for a bed-fellow, and, to give her the more authority, she had the title of cousin conferred on her by the venerable president of this college. Here I underwent a second survey, which ended in the full approbation of Mrs. Phœbe Ayres, the name of my tutoress elect, to whose care and instruction I was affectionately recommended. Dinner was now set on table, and in pursuance of treating me as a companion, Mrs. Brown, with a tone to cut off all dispute, soon over-ruled my most humble and most confused protestations against sitting down with her Ladyship, which my very short breeding just suggested to me could not be right, or in the order of things. At table, the conversation was chiefly kept up by the two madams and carried on in double meaning expressions, interrupted every now and then by kind assurances to me, all tending to confirm and fix my satisfaction with my present condition: augment it they could not, so very a novice was I then. It was here agreed that I should keep myself up and out of sight for a few days, till such clothes could be procured for me as were fit for the character I was to appear in, of my mistress’s companion, observing withal, that on the first impressions of my figure much might depend; and, as they rightly judged, the prospect of exchanging my country clothes for London finery, made the clause of confinement digest perfectly well with me.