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.

Page 4 of 112 · 20 per page

• From Between Us

  Like partners in a dance, your emotions and those of others complement and steer each other to form the interaction. And shared cultural knowledge, in the form of language and practices, orchestrates the ways in which different individuals do emotions together. It is like dancing the tango at the rhythm of tango music, together with a partner who knows their dance steps, as you know yours. The dance emerges from everyone knowing their moves, and from the moves being in sync with the music. Doing your emotions in a way that fits with the relationships in your culture, and with your position in those relationships, is akin to having the right dance steps. So, what happens when people move to another culture? If doing emotions is like dancing the tango, is doing emotions in another culture like dancing the tango with a partner who has never learned the tango steps? The metaphor holds in that you think you are producing the right dance steps—you expect your steps will merge with the other person’s steps to form the dance—but they end up being out of sync, and possibly result in stepping on each other’s toes. And there is more to doing emotions than just you and a partner doing a private dance: doing emotions in another culture, at least initially, is dancing the tango when everybody else in the ballroom dances to the music of a waltz. Some individuals never get beyond the stage of noticing that other people perform a different dance than they were used to in their culture of origin. By her own admission, the anthropologist Jean Briggs had great difficulty understanding the emotions of Utku Inuit. At first, she did not understand when and why her hosts were angry, and she had difficulty identifying anger expressions when they occurred. Her ethnography shows an understanding of the emotion norms in the end, but she never internalized those norms. As linguist Aneta Pavlenko astutely conjectures, the very fact that Briggs considered her own way of doing emotions “natural” prevented her from ever completely fitting into her new emotional community. Briggs might have been unable, and perhaps unwilling, to do so, perhaps because she never saw herself as permanently living in the Utku community. At the other end of the spectrum are immigrants who end up clearly mastering the dance to the new music. In her autobiography Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes how she gradually adopted new ways of doing emotions after moving at the age of thirteen from Poland to the United States: Eventually, the voices enter me; by assuming them, I gradually make them mine. I am being remade, fragment by fragment, like a patchwork quilt; there are more colors in the world than I ever knew.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He stares at the ground, his brows drawn together. “I was at the hospital, just leaving my shift. The sun had just come up. I remember stopping to look at it. Then nothing.” “This doesn’t make sense. Why would someone bring the two of us here?” I think about the lighters and the key and the carousel room, and then I push it from my brain. A coincidence. But I want to laugh even as I think it. “I don’t know,” Isaac says. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that. I think about all the times in my life I’ve counted on him for answers—demanded answers—and he always has them. But that was then… He runs his hand over the stubble on his jaw, and I notice the deep purple bruises on his wrists where his bindings dug into his skin. How long had he been tied up like that? How long had I been unconscious? “We need to get warm,” Isaac says. “I made a fire … in the room up the ladder.” We search for the thermostat. I notice how white his knuckles are around the handle of the knife. We find it in the carousel room, behind the door. He turns on the heat. “If there is power, we must be close to something,” I say hopefully. He shakes his head. “Not necessarily. It could be a generator. This might not last.” I nod, but I don’t believe him. We climb up to the round room to sit by the fire and wait for the house to heat. He makes me go first. Once I am up, he glances over his shoulder one last time and then quickly climbs up to join me. We close the trapdoor and lock it. We try to scoot the armoire over it, but that’s bolted too. The fire I built is puttering out. There are three extra logs. I reach for one and place it on the flames while Isaac takes a look around. “Where do you think we are?” I ask when he comes to sit on the floor next to me. He sets the knife down between us. This makes me feel better. I don’t trust anything yet. If he’s not hiding his weapons from me, that’s a good thing. “This much snow? Who knows? We could be anywhere.” We are nowhere, I think. “How did you get out of your bindings?” “What?” I don’t understand what he’s saying, then I realize that he thinks I was tied up too. “I didn’t have any,” I say. He turns his head to look at me. We are so close the vapors of our breath are mingling mid-air. He has dark stubble on his face. I want to rub my palm across it just so I can feel something sharp and real.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I carried my handful of snow over, stopping when I reached the driver’s side door. Anyone could drive past my house and see me half undressed, cupping snow in my hand and staring limpidly at my snow-capped Volvo. There was a brown square underneath the blade. I dropped my snow, and it landed in a semi-hard clump on my foot. The package was thin, wrapped grocery bag paper I turned it over in my hands. He’d written something on it in blue sharpie. His handwriting flicked across the paper in messy, carefree lines. A doctor’s scrawl, the kind you might find on a medical chart or a script. I narrowed my eyes, absently licking off drops of snow on the back of my hand. Words. That’s what he’d written. I carried it inside, flipping it over in my hand. There was a slot on one side of the cardboard. I stuck my finger inside and pulled out a CD. It was black. A generic disk, something he’d burned himself. Curious, I put the disk into my stereo and hit play with my big toe as I stretched out on the floor. Music. I closed my eyes. Heavy drum beat, a woman’s words … her voice bothered me. It was emotive, going from warm cooing to hard with each word. I didn’t like it. It was too unstable, unpredictable. It was bipolar. I stood up to turn it off. If this was Isaac’s attempt at facilitating me into his music, he was going to have to try for something less… The words—they suddenly picked me up and held me, dangling in the air; I could kick and writhe and I wouldn’t have been able to come down from them. I listened, staring at the fire, and then I listened with my eyes closed. When it was over, I played it again and listened for what he was trying to convey. When I ripped the CD from the player and stuffed it back in its envelope my hands were shaking. I marched it to the kitchen and shoved it in the back of my junk drawer, underneath the Neiman Marcus catalog and pile of bills bound by a rubber band. I was agitated. My hands couldn’t stop moving— through my skunk streak, into my pockets, pulling on my bottom lip. I needed a detox so I retreated to my office to soak up the colorless solitude. I lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Normally the white cleansed me, calmed me, but today the words to the song found me. I’ll write! I thought. I stood up and moved to my desk. But even when the blank Word document was pulled up in front of me—clean and white—I couldn’t splash any thoughts onto it. I sat at my desk and stared at the cursor.

• From Between Us

  Once we understand how our emotions connect us to our communities, it becomes obvious why emotions may be a roadblock for interactions between people who were raised in different communities. Knowing others’ realities takes more than merely translating a word. In chapter 7, I will introduce you to the research on learning a new culture’s emotions. The good news is: It is possible. The potentially bad news is: It takes immigrant groups more than a generation to be indistinguishable from nonimmigrants. In the last chapter, I’ll show how taking an OURS perspective can be a first step to communicating across dividing lines and finding common ground. While emotions may be a liability when we interact across cultures (or positions, class, religion, and so on), an OURS model makes sense of the differences in emotions, and provides a wonderful window on other cultures’ values and priorities. Communicating about different ways of understanding and acting in the world—about our emotions—will humanize each of us, as it shows how we each are part and parcel of our social connections. BETWEEN USChapter 1. . . . . . . . . Lost in TranslationDo all human beings have emotions, just like we all have noses or hands? Our noses have different shapes and sizes but when all is said and done they help us breathe, and let us sniff and smell the world around us. Our hands can be big or small, strong or weak, but regardless they help us touch, grasp, hold, and carry. Does the same hold for emotions? Is it true that emotions can look different but, in the end, we all have the same emotions—that deep inside, everybody is like yourself? It would mean that once you take the time to get to know somebody, you will recognize and comprehend the feelings of people who have different backgrounds, speak different languages, come from other communities or cultures. But are other people angry, happy, and scared, just like you? And are your feelings just like theirs? I do not think so. The first time I became aware that my emotions were not like those of people from another culture was when I moved to the United States. I was raised in the Netherlands, and, save some short ventures to other European countries, that was where I had lived until I was about thirty years old. In many ways, my transition was easy. My English was conversational when I first came to the States, because I had used it professionally. My American colleagues at the University of Michigan could not have been nicer. The day I arrived, they welcomed me with a faculty dinner. One of them invited me to their Christmas family dinner; others gave me small end-of-the year presents. Yet, I remember my first year in the United States as rocky. I often felt a little off.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Nick opens the door for me and we walk into my house. Dust fills my nose and mouth as I breathe in fourteen months of packed-up air. I touch the edge of his hand with my fingertip. He opens his fingers and entwines them with mine. He walks with me from room to room, and I feel like a ghost. He’s never been in my house. Making money off of heartbreak is a good business to be in. When we reach the white room I jerk to a stop in the doorway. I can’t go in. Isaac looks down at me. Nick. Nick looks down at me. “What’s wrong?” he asks. Everything. “This,” I say, staring at all the white. Then, “Why did you come, Nick?” We are on the edge of the white room. Technically a room that he created, inside of me and out. He looks stricken. “Did you read my book?” “Did you mean the book?” I spin back. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?” He starts to step into my white room like he wants to take a look around. I grab his arm. “We talk about this right here.” I want him on the brink of what he drove me to. I want to know what this is before I cross any more thresholds. He leans against one side of the doorframe. I lean against the other. “I was wrong. I was young and idealistic. I didn’t realize…” He grimaces. “I didn’t realize your value until it was too late.” “My value?” “Your worth to me, Brenna. You spark things in me. You always have. I love you. I never stopped. I was just…” “Young and idealistic,” I repeat. He nods. “And stupid.” I study him. Look at the white. Look at him. “You have writer’s block,” I say. “You wrote the last book, and everyone freaked out. And now you have nothing else.” He looks startled. “Tell me it’s not true.” I flick at the grey falling into my eyes. Then I think better of it, and let it drop back to cover them. “It’s not like that,” he says. “You know we are good together. We inspire each other. Greatness comes when we are together.” I think about this. He is right, of course. We were great together. Some days I woke up playful. I wanted to laugh and flirt and be a love story. The very next day I couldn’t stand being looked at or spoken to. Nick let me be. He spoke to me on the days I wanted to be spoken to. He left me alone when I shot eye daggers at him. We coexisted fluently and effortlessly. With him I can have companionship and love, and never have who I am questioned. We were great together. Until Isaac taught me something new. I didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to be questioned. I needed it.

• From Between Us

  There were differences in these association networks. For instance, the English fear was more closely associated with fear responses (“anxiety,” “nervous,” “stress,” “sweat,” “scream,” “shaking”), whereas its Spanish counterpart, miedo, was associated with words for loneliness and aloneness. Interestingly, foreign-language learners who had never lived in a Spanish-speaking environment, or not for very long, learned the Spanish words but without acquiring the Spanish associations; they simply glued a new word (e.g., miedo) to an existing concept (e.g., associations with “anxiety,” “nervous,” “stress,” “sweat,” “scream,” “shaking”). Only when second-language speakers of Spanish had lived in the country for some time would they start to make the Spanish word associations; they could be said to have learned the “emotions”—i.e., a new set of episodes— rather than merely the labels. Not until you personally experience, or watch, the new culture’s emotional interactions do you learn what it means to have the emotions of a new culture. Until then, the new words are empty vessels, or rather, vessels filled with old baggage. When I learned English, I never suspected that anger was different from the Dutch boos. I just used them interchangeably; I attached my old experiences to the new word. I now know (from research) that these words are different, if only somewhat. Anger words in English (e.g., “angry”) are more closely associated with aggression (e.g., “yell,” “argue,” “hit”) than anger words in Dutch (e.g., boos, kwaad). In turn, Dutch anger words have a stronger association with distancing yourself from the situation (e.g., “leave,” “ignore,” “forget”) than English anger words. This may be so because the angry and boos episodes in the respective cultures are different. It is not until you experience a lot of those episodes that you come to learn the “emotion” in the new culture. By merely including emotion concepts that were similar on the dimensions of valence and goals, and by exclusively focusing on these dimensions, our research with emotion profiles steered clear from the way immigrant individuals learn new emotion concepts. However, in some cases, linguistic equivalents in Turkish and (Belgian) Dutch were different, even with respect to the two basic dimensions of meaning we considered. The Turkish words for “resigned” and “embarrassed” were positive, but the Belgian Dutch words were negative; the Turkish word for “jealousy” was relationship-protecting, but its Belgian Dutch equivalent was protective of personal goals.

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

  The most antagonistic emotions were battling within me. In the meantime she sat down on one of the stone-benches, and played with a flower. “Well—am I?” I kneeled down and seized her hands. “Once more I beg you to become my wife, my true and loyal wife; if you can’t do that then become the embodiment of my ideal, absolutely, without reservation, without softness.” “You know I am ready at the end of a year to give you my hand, if you prove to be the man I am seeking,” Wanda replied very seriously, “but I think you would be more grateful to me if through me you realized your imaginings. Well, which do you prefer?” “I believe that everything my imagination has dreamed lies latent in your personality.” “You are mistaken.” “I believe,” I continued, “that you enjoy having a man wholly in your power, torturing him—” “No, no,” she exclaimed quickly, “or perhaps—.” She pondered. “I don’t understand myself any longer,” she continued, “but I have a confession to make to you. You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood. I am beginning to like the things you speak of. The enthusiasm with which you speak of a Pompadour, a Catherine the Second, and all the other selfish, frivolous, cruel women, carries me away and takes hold of my soul. It urges me on to become like those women, who in spite of their vileness were slavishly adored during their lifetime and still exert a miraculous power from their graves. “You will end by making of me a despot in miniature, a domestic Pompadour.” “Well then,” I said in agitation, “if all this is inherent in you, give way to this trend of your nature. Nothing half-way. If you can’t be a true and loyal wife to me, be a demon.” I was nervous from loss of sleep, and the proximity of the beautiful woman affected me like a fever. I no longer recall what I said, but I remember that I kissed her feet, and finally raised her foot and put my neck under it. She withdrew it quickly, and rose almost angrily. “If you love me, Severin,” she said quickly, and her voice sounded sharp and commanding, “never speak to me of those things again. Understand, never! Otherwise I might really—” She smiled and sat down again. “I am entirely serious,” I exclaimed, half-raving. “I adore you so infinitely that I am willing to suffer anything from you, for the sake of spending my whole life near you.” “Severin, once more I warn you.” “Your warning is vain.

• From Between Us

  Once again, I would allow the concept to help me write the story. Characteristic of emotion stories is that there is an urge to act; not responding is not an option. The way you make sense of your feelings depends on the emotion concepts that are available in your culture; these concepts are shared within your social community. The emotion concepts that I have available afford certain ways of “writing” the emotion story, and make alternative endings of the story unlikely. Emotion concepts also help us make sense of the behavior of our interaction partners. Applying the “wrong” concept is at a cost. Marie, a U.S. American student in psychologist Phillip Shaver’s research, reports being confused because her boyfriend was “so mad” at her, when all she had done was be a little late. Following the lead of “mad,” Marie was looking for the behavior that had merited her boyfriend’s rage. Why was she looking into her own behavior? Because anger suggests there is a reason—anger is justified. She might have had an easier time making sense, had she seen his behavior as “jealous.” It turns out he was outraged because he thought she had an affair, and was late for her appointment with him because of it. Applying an emotion concept, either to oneself or to others, disambiguates the meaning of an ongoing emotional episode. It does so by focusing attention on certain aspects of the situation, and ignoring others; by making meaning of the event in a certain way, and by privileging a certain type of action. A similar situation (a disobedient child) taken as an instance of amae, shifts the focus on your child’s immaturity and needs, but taken as an instance of Ärger will focus on your frustration as a parent, and will lead you to emphasize the ill intentions behind the behavior of your child. You as a mother engage the situation differently, depending on your interpretation: empathic coaxing in the case of amae, and annoyed punishment in the case of Ärger. Recognizing an emotion (among other emotions) is inserting your knowledge of a particular set of episodes. It means that you bring online everything you know about your emotional episodes in comparable situations, plus all the cultural knowledge that is implicit in the set. There is good reason to assume that without a concept, there is no emotion as we know it. Woven into the emotion concepts are sets of cultural episodes with outcomes that are either desirable or undesirable, given the context and the position of the person. In the language of this book: “right” emotions are episodes with desired endings, “wrong” emotions are stories with endings that you would like to avoid. As we have seen in chapter 4, “anger” is considered a useful, if often unpleasant, emotion in U.S. contexts; it has desirable endings. In close relationships, it is thought to help individuals protect their needs and expectations, and in work settings, it sets clear boundaries.

• From Between Us

  Doing your emotions in a way that fits with the relationships in your culture, and with your position in those relationships, is akin to having the right dance steps. So, what happens when people move to another culture? If doing emotions is like dancing the tango, is doing emotions in another culture like dancing the tango with a partner who has never learned the tango steps? The metaphor holds in that you think you are producing the right dance steps—you expect your steps will merge with the other person’s steps to form the dance—but they end up being out of sync, and possibly result in stepping on each other’s toes. And there is more to doing emotions than just you and a partner doing a private dance: doing emotions in another culture, at least initially, is dancing the tango when everybody else in the ballroom dances to the music of a waltz. Some individuals never get beyond the stage of noticing that other people perform a different dance than they were used to in their culture of origin. By her own admission, the anthropologist Jean Briggs had great difficulty understanding the emotions of Utku Inuit. At first, she did not understand when and why her hosts were angry, and she had difficulty identifying anger expressions when they occurred. Her ethnography shows an understanding of the emotion norms in the end, but she never internalized those norms. As linguist Aneta Pavlenko astutely conjectures, the very fact that Briggs considered her own way of doing emotions “natural” prevented her from ever completely fitting into her new emotional community. Briggs might have been unable, and perhaps unwilling, to do so, perhaps because she never saw herself as permanently living in the Utku community. At the other end of the spectrum are immigrants who end up clearly mastering the dance to the new music. In her autobiography Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes how she gradually adopted new ways of doing emotions after moving at the age of thirteen from Poland to the United States: Eventually, the voices enter me; by assuming them, I gradually make them mine. I am being remade, fragment by fragment, like a patchwork quilt; there are more colors in the world than I ever knew. Hoffman may have been temporarily “lost in translation” but in the end she managed to become part of the new emotion culture. Immigrants can learn to dance the waltz, but how much or how often do they?

• From Between Us

  After having spent considerable time in the United States, I now no longer draw a blank when the word is used. I know both when distress is felt, and what the experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an “emotion” to me. Sofia, an English-Greek bilingual speaker who had lived in Cyprus for over seven years, reported something similar for the Greek word stenahoria —literally, “constricted space.” Stenahoria does not have a linguistic equivalent in English. Sofia knew approximately when stenahoria was used. But despite knowing the word, and some of the conditions under which it was used, Sofia has real trouble describing the emotion behind stenahoria. The word was “used by old people” only, never by her Greek husband. Sofia had not been part of the cultural episodes or interactions that could have fully furnished the Greek word stenahoria with its meaning. Learning to speak a language is learning not only new words, but also acquiring new emotions. The process can be slow, and research confirms that immigrants learn the words in a new language before they learn the associated emotions. I knew that I did not know under what circumstances distress occurred, how it felt, and what you would do when distressed. I knew that I did not know if distress made you a bad person, or what responses it elicited in others. Similarly, Sofia had no trouble recognizing her unfamiliarity with stenahoria. It is much harder to become aware that you have to learn the emotions associated with words for which your native language does provide a linguistic equivalent. Yet, learning these “emotions” is not necessarily any faster or easier than learning culture-specific emotion words. In fact, second language learners who are not immersed in the new culture simply attach the new language’s emotion words to the concepts from their native culture. This is what happens in classroom learning of a second language—the way I started to learn English: we learn the labels of the new language, but without learning their actual meaning. The linguist Howard Grabois nicely illustrates this point in a study on Spanish second-language learning. To chart the respective meanings of words for love, fear, and happiness in Spanish and in English, he compared the word associations that Spanish native speakers had with these concepts with the associations that English native speakers have.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Eltringham went back to her desk and put her head in her hands. She was twenty-six years old. Everything she knew about sailing she had learned from Hubbard. To his credit, he had been a good teacher. He had taken a dozen members of the original Sea Org crew and taught them the semaphore code, how to navigate using a sextant, and basic laws of the sea. But she knew nothing about running the engine room, or operating the electronics on the bridge, or docking a ship. Half an hour later, Hubbard stuck his head out of his office and beckoned to her. He was holding an E-Meter. Standing in the doorway where everyone could see them, Hubbard handed her the cans. Then he screwed up his eyes and demanded, “Recall a time you were last a captain.” As Eltringham closed her eyes and began to free-associate, Hubbard watched the needle on the E-Meter. “What’s that?” he asked, when the needle suddenly dropped. “That was sometime on a ship somewhere and the ship was sinking,” Eltringham responded. “Okay, go back earlier.” A moment later, he asked her again, “What’s that?” “That’s just a lot of confusion. I’m in a cabin with a lot of other people. Something urgent is going on.” Hubbard asked her to talk more about it. Eltringham began to see the incident more clearly. “We were in some kind of spaceship,” she said. “We were under attack and—oh my God!—I can see a planet down there! And the planet’s on fire! And something is shooting at us and—oh my God!—the spaceship exploded!” Hubbard asked her to tell the story several more times to destimulate the incident. Then he asked Eltringham how she was feeling. “I’m fine, sir.” Hubbard screwed up his eyes again. “Do you have any other thoughts about it?” Eltringham realized that he was looking for a floating needle, but she wasn’t able to give it to him. “Okay, one more question. Are you a loyal officer?” “I don’t know what you mean by that,” Eltringham said. “I’m loyal to you, and I’m an officer.” Hubbard said, “All right, that’s as far as we’ll go this time.” Eltringham walked up on the deck and tried to take in what Hubbard meant. Suddenly it came to her. Hubbard wasn’t talking about the present. He was referring to the time in her visualization. Some catastrophe must have happened. Eltringham realized that it must have been her planet that was being attacked, and she had been trying to save it. A few minutes later, Hubbard came up on deck and stood beside her. She turned to him and said, “Yep, you’re right, sir. I was a loyal officer. I am.” Hubbard beamed. THE AVON RIVER WAS traveling down the east side of Corsica when Hubbard gathered his crew and read them a new revelation.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  [image file=image36.jpg] We finish our project—the page project, as we call it. In the end we have four piles and only three books: Mine, Nick’s, and the nameless book. The fourth pile is the thickest and the most confusing. I stack each one with care that is mostly habit, lining up the corners until none of the pages poke past each other. The problem is, there is nothing on the pages. Each one is bone white. I have the fleeting thought that the zookeeper wants me to write a new book, then Yul Brenner reminds me that my personal Annie Wilkes didn’t leave me a pen. Can’t write a book without a pen. I wonder if I can resuscitate the old Bic we used when we first woke up here. It must be symbolic, like the pictures hung all over the house—pictures of hollow sparrows, and bearers of death. I stare at the piles of paper while Isaac makes us tea. I can hear the tinkle of the spoon as it hits the sides of the ceramic cup. I murmur something to the books spread out around me, my lips moving in incantation. We may have separated them, but without page numbers they are still out of order. How do you bring order to a book you’ve never read? Or maybe that’s point of this little exercise. Maybe I’m supposed to bring my own personal order to the two books I’ve never read. Either way, I’m telling them to sort themselves out and speak to me. Voices have been, and always will be, too afraid to speak with as much volume as a book. That’s why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard. In these pages are thoughts that the zookeeper wants me to hear. I don’t know why, and I don’t care except to get out of here. To get Isaac out of here. “Do you want to have children?” he asks me when he carries our tea into the room. I am startled by the randomness of his question. We don’t talk about normal things. Our conversations are about survival. My hand trembles when I take the cup. Who could think about children at a time like this? Two pals just sitting around, chatting about their life expectations? I want to rip open my shirt and remind him that he cut off my breasts. Remind him that we are prisoners. People in our predicament didn’t talk about the possibility of children. But still … because it is Isaac who asks me, and because he has given so much, I let my mind rove over what he’s saying.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I read through the rest of it, but I have the feeling that those are the words I was meant to see first. Isaac hands me another page, this one with a spot of blood the size of my fist blooming out from the middle of the page like a flower. The font is different, as is the size of the page. I rub it between my fingers. I know this feel; it’s Nick’s book. This is Knotted . Isaac pushes the box closer to where I’m sitting so that I’m able to reach inside. The pages are all pulled from their binding, lined in four rows. I lift another page. The style lines up with the first book, lyrical with an old-fashioned feel to the prose. There is something strange about the writing, something I know I should remember, and cannot. I start pulling out pages at random. Separating the pages of Nick’s book from the new one. I work quickly, my fingers lifting and piling, lifting and piling. Isaac watches me from where he leans against the wall, his arms folded, lips pursed. I know that underneath his lips his two front teeth slightly overlap. I don’t know why I have this thought, at this time, but as I sort pages my thoughts are on Isaac’s two front teeth. I am about halfway through the box when I realize that there is a third book. This one is mine. My fingers linger over the bright white pages—white because I told the publisher if they printed on cream I would sue them for breach of contract. Three books. One written for MV, one written for Nick … but the third…? My eyes reach over to the unknown pile. Who belongs to that book? And what is the zookeeper trying to tell me? Isaac pushes himself off the wall and steps toward the pile that belongs to Nick. “We have to finish reading this one,” he says. My face drains of blood and I can feel a tingling along the tops of my shoulders as they tighten. I hand him the pile. “It’s out of order and the pages aren’t numbered. Good luck.” Our fingers touch. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and I look away quickly. We work to set the books in order. Through the longest night, the night that never ends. It’s good to have something to do, to keep you from waltzing down crazy street—not that we haven’t already been there. It’s a street you only want to visit a couple times in your life. We have power again … heat. So we take advantage by not sleeping, our fingers flying over pages, our brows creased with the strain. Isaac has Nick’s book. I take on the task of the other two—mine and…? It seems that there are too many pages to make up only three books.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  The box is just out of my reach. To get to it I’ll have to use something to pull myself up. Since the couch no longer has a back, there is nothing I can use for leverage. Isaac, I realize, is being very strategic. I take a breath; it is broken in half by a sob that never reaches my lips. My chest convulses as I open my mouth to speak. I don’t want to tell him anything, but I must. “It’s the black vein that curves around the back of a shrimp. Nick called it the mud vein. You have to remove it to make the shrimp clean…” My voice is monotone. “Why did he call you that?” When Isaac and I ask each other questions it reminds me of a tennis match. Once you’ve sent one over the net, you know it’s going to come back, you just don’t know the direction. “Isn’t it obvious?” He blinks at me. One second, two seconds, three seconds… “No.” “I don’t get you,” I say. “You don’t get you,” he shoots back. We have resumed our eye transmissions. I’m glaring, but his stare is more candid. After a minute he steps over to the box and opens it. I try not to lean forward. I try not to hold my breath, but there is a white box with the words For MV stenciled on the lid in blood. I am aching to know what’s inside. Isaac reaches down. I hear the gentle whisper of paper. When his hand comes up he’s holding a loose page that looks as if it’s been torn from a book. The corners have soaked up some blood. For MV Blood soaked pages, for MV… Who knew that Nick called me that, besides Nick himself? Isaac starts to read. “The punishment for her peace was upon him, and he gave her rest.” I hold out my hand. I want to see the page, know who wrote it. It wasn’t Nick; I know his style. It wasn’t me. I take the blood-stained page, careful to keep my fingers away from the red parts. I read silently what Isaac read out loud. The page is numbered 212. There is no title or author name. I read through the rest of it, but I have the feeling that those are the words I was meant to see first. Isaac hands me another page, this one with a spot of blood the size of my fist blooming out from the middle of the page like a flower. The font is different, as is the size of the page. I rub it between my fingers. I know this feel; it’s Nick’s book. This is Knotted.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It is made of bones. I am not fond of the truth; it’s why I lie for a living. But I am looking for someone to blame. “So, then this is a coincidence, just like I initially said.” I no longer believe that, but Isaac is withholding something from me. “No, Senna. Have you looked at the horses—I mean really looked at them?” I spin around to face him. “I’m looking at them right now!” Why am I shouting? Isaac jumps up and rounds on me. When I won’t look at him he grabs my shoulders and spins me ‘til I’m facing the black horse again. He holds me firmly. “Hush and look at it, Senna.” I flinch. I look just so he won’t say my name like that again. I see the black horse, but with new eyes: non-stubborn, just plain old Senna eyes. I see it all. I feel it all. The rain, the music, the horse whose pole had a crack in it. I can smell dirt and sardines … something else, too … cardamom and clove. I pull out of it, pull out of the memory so fast my breath stops. Isaac’s hands loosen on my shoulders. I’m disappointed; he was warm. I am free to run, but I curl my toes until I can feel them gripping carpet, and I stay. I came here to solve one of our problems. One of our many problems. These are the same horses. The very same. I trace the crack with my eyes. Yul says something about me repressing my memories. I laugh at him. Repressing my memories. That’s a Saphira Elgin thing to say. But he’s right, isn’t he? I’m in a fog and half the time I don’t even realize it. “The date that it happened,” I say softly. “That’s what will open the door.” The air prickles, then he runs. I hear him taking the stairs two at a time. I didn’t even have to remind him of the date. It’s cut into the fleshy part of our memories. I wait with my eyes closed; praying it works, praying it doesn’t. He comes back a minute later. Much slower this time. Plunk, plunk, plunk up the stairs. I feel him standing in the doorway looking at me. I can smell him too. I used to bury my head in his neck and breath in his smell. Oh God, I’m so cold. “ Senna,” he says, “want to come outside?” Yes. Sure. Why not? Part Two Pain & Guilt I woke up and stared at my ceiling. Something was wrong … something … but I couldn’t figure out what it was. A weight pressed down on my chest. The kind that comes when you feel dread, but you can’t quite place your finger on why. Five minutes, twenty minutes, two minutes, seven minutes, an hour.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He shakes me. I stare up at him, my breath coming quickly. He must see something in my eyes, because he wraps me in a hug. I shiver against his warmth until he pulls away from me. “Let me see your wrist,” he says gently. I hold it out to him, flinching as he pokes at it gently with his cold fingertips. He nods in approval at my makeshift sling. “It’s a sprain,” he says. “Did you have it before you woke up?” I shake my head. “I fell … upstairs.” “Where did you wake up?” I tell him about the room at the top of the ladder, how I found the key. “I think I was drugged.” He nods. “Yes, we both were. Let’s go take a look at this room. Also, if there is power, there should be heat. We need to find the thermostat.” We make our way back up the stairs. I look at his face. His dark eyes look bleary like he’s coming down from a high—except he doesn’t take drugs. Not even for a headache. I know a lot about this man. That’s what’s shocking me the most. Why am I here? Why am I here with him? His head swivels to look at me. It’s as if he’s really seeing me for the first time. I can see the up and down movement of his chest as he struggles for breath. This was me, fifteen minutes ago. His eyes search my face, before he says, “What do you remember?” I shake my head. “I had dinner in Seattle. I left around ten. I stopped for gas on my way home. That’s it. You?” He stares at the ground, his brows drawn together. “I was at the hospital, just leaving my shift. The sun had just come up. I remember stopping to look at it. Then nothing.” “This doesn’t make sense. Why would someone bring the two of us here?” I think about the lighters and the key and the carousel room, and then I push it from my brain. A coincidence. But I want to laugh even as I think it. “I don’t know,” Isaac says. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that. I think about all the times in my life I’ve counted on him for answers—demanded answers—and he always has them. But that was then… He runs his hand over the stubble on his jaw, and I notice the deep purple bruises on his wrists where his bindings dug into his skin. How long had he been tied up like that? How long had I been unconscious? “We need to get warm,” Isaac says. “I made a fire … in the room up the ladder.” We search for the thermostat.

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

  But when they were alone together, and her inamorato began to proceed to those extremities which instantly discover the sex, she remarked, that no description could paint up to the life, the mixture of pique, confusion and disappointment, that appeared in his countenance, joined to the mournful exclamation: “By heavens, a woman!” This at once opened her eyes, which had been shut in downright stupidity. However, as if he had meant to retrieve that escape, he still continued to toy with and fondle her, but with so staring an alteration from extreme warmth into a chill and forced civility, that even Emily herself could not but take notice of it, and now began to wish she had paid more regard to Mrs. Cole’s premonitions against ever engaging with a stranger. And now an excess of timidity succeeded to an excess of confidence, and she thought herself so much at his mercy and discretion, that she stood passive throughout the whole progress of his prelude: for now, whether the impressions of so great a beauty had even made him forgive her sex, or whether her appearance or figure in that dress still humoured his first illusion, he recovered by degrees a good part of his first warmth, and keeping Emily with her breeches still unbuttoned, stript them down to her knees, and gently impelling her to lean down, with her face against the bed-side, placed her so, that the double way, between the double rising behind, presented the choice fair to him, and he was so fairly set on a mis-direction, as to give the girl no small alarms for fear of losing a maidenhead she had not dreamt of. However, her complaints, and a resistance, gentle, but firm, checked and brought him to himself again; so that turning his steed’s head, he drove him at length in the right road, in which his imagination having probably made the most of those resemblances that flattered his taste, he got, with much ado, to his journey’s end: after which, he led her out himself, and walking with her two or three streets length, got her a chair, when making her a present not any thing inferior to what she could have expected, he left her, well recommended to the chairmen, who, on her directions, brought her home. This she related to Mrs. Cole and me the same morning, not without the visible remains of the fear and confusion she had been in, still stamped on her countenance. Mrs. Cole’s remark was, that her indiscretion proceeding from a constitutional facility, there were little hopes of any thing curing her of it, but repeated severe experience. Mine was, that I could not conceive how it was possible for mankind to run into a taste, not only universally odious, but absurd, and impossible to gratify; since, according to the notions and experience I had of things, it was not in nature to force such immense disproportions. Mrs.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I can hear the tinkle of the spoon as it hits the sides of the ceramic cup. I murmur something to the books spread out around me, my lips moving in incantation. We may have separated them, but without page numbers they are still out of order. How do you bring order to a book you’ve never read? Or maybe that’s point of this little exercise. Maybe I’m supposed to bring my own personal order to the two books I’ve never read. Either way, I’m telling them to sort themselves out and speak to me. Voices have been, and always will be, too afraid to speak with as much volume as a book. That’s why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard. In these pages are thoughts that the zookeeper wants me to hear. I don’t know why, and I don’t care except to get out of here. To get Isaac out of here. “Do you want to have children?” he asks me when he carries our tea into the room. I am startled by the randomness of his question. We don’t talk about normal things. Our conversations are about survival. My hand trembles when I take the cup. Who could think about children at a time like this? Two pals just sitting around, chatting about their life expectations? I want to rip open my shirt and remind him that he cut off my breasts. Remind him that we are prisoners. People in our predicament didn’t talk about the possibility of children. But still … because it is Isaac who asks me, and because he has given so much, I let my mind rove over what he’s saying. I once saw a toddler throw a fit at Heathrow Airport. Her older sister confiscated an iPhone from the little girl’s hands when she threatened to send it flying across the floor. As with most children, the tiny girl, who teetered on fresh, newly-walking legs, had a loud, indignant response. She wailed, dropped to her knees and made an awful herky-jerky noise that sounded like an ambulance siren. It rose and fell in crescendo, causing people to look and wince. As she wailed, she slid backwards on the ground until she was lying face up, her knees bent underneath her. I watched in astonishment as her arms flailed about, alternating between what looked like the backstroke and an interpretive butterfly dance. Her face was pressed into an anguished scowl, her mouth still sending out those godawful noises, when all of a sudden she scrambled to her feet, and ran laughing toward a fountain a few yards away. As far as I was concerned children had bipolar disorder.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It was one of my favorites. And if you’d asked me, “What is it about?” I don’t think I could have told you. But this was the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve . Adrienne: You had to make your own. Audre: There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize my poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head. And I remember trying when I was in high school not to think in poems. I saw the way other people thought, and it was an amazement to me — step by step, not in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor with words … I really do believe I learned this from my mother. Adrienne: Learned what from your mother? Andre: The important value of nonverbal communication, beneath language. My life depended on it. At the same time, living in the world, I didn’t want to have anything to do with the way she was using language. My mother had a strange way with words: if one didn’t serve her or wasn’t strong enough, she’d just make up another word, and then that would enter our family language forever, and woe betide any of us who forgot it. But I think I got another message from her … that there was a whole powerful world of nonverbal communication and contact between people that was absolutely essential and that was what you had to learn to decipher and use. One of the reasons I had so much trouble growing up was that my parents, my mother in particular, always expected me to know what she was feeling and what she expected me to do without telling me. And I thought this was natural. My mother would expect me to know things, whether or not she spoke them … Adrienne: Ignorance of the law was no excuse. Audre: That’s right. It’s very confusing. But eventually I learned how to acquire vital and protective information without words. My mother used to say to me, “Don’t just listen like a ninny to what people say in their mouth.” But then she’d proceed to say something that didn’t feel right to me. You always learned from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself, whatever it is that you need in order to survive. And if you make a mistake you get punished for it, but that’s no big thing. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  My mother used to say to me, “Don’t just listen like a ninny to what people say in their mouth.” But then she’d proceed to say something that didn’t feel right to me. You always learned from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself, whatever it is that you need in order to survive. And if you make a mistake you get punished for it, but that’s no big thing. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability. When I went to high school, I found out that people really thought in different ways — perceived, puzzled out, acquired information verbally. I had such a hard time. I never studied; I literally intuited all my teachers. That’s why it was so important to get a teacher who I liked because I never studied, I never read my assignment, and I would get all this stuff — what they felt, what they knew — but I missed a lot of other stuff, a lot of my own original workings. Adrienne: When you said you never read, you meant you never read the assignments, but you were reading? Audre: If I read things that were assigned, I didn’t read them the way we were supposed to. Everything was like a poem, with different curves, different levels. So I always felt that the ways I took things in were different from the ways other people took them in. I used to practice trying to think. Adrienne: That thing those other people presumably did. Do you remember what that was like? Andre: Yes. I had an image of trying to reach something around a corner, that it was just eluding me. The image was constantly vanishing. There was an experience I had in Mexico, when I moved to Cuernavaca ... Adrienne: This was when you were about how old? Andre: I was nineteen. I was commuting to Mexico City for classes. In order to get to my early class I would catch a six o’clock turismo in the village plaza. I would come out of my house before dawn. You know, there are two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtacuhuatl. I thought they were clouds the first time I saw them through my windows. It would be dark, and I would see the snow on top of the mountains and the sun coming up. And when the sun crested, at a certain point, the birds would start. But because we were in the valley it would still look like night. But there would be the light of the snow.