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 5 of 112 · 20 per page

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It’s a terrible feeling, everything coming up from your stomach. Bulimics should get a medal. I use his toothbrush because I can’t find mine. The one thing I’m not is a germaphobe. When I walk out of the bathroom, he’s lying on the bed. Dressed, thank God. “How come you didn’t get sick?” He looks up at me. “I guess I’m an old pro.” I have a fleeting thought, one where I wonder if he’s the one who brought us here. I narrow my eyes and scan my mind for motive. Then I come to my senses. Isaac has no reason for wanting to be here. There is no reason for him to be here at all. “Do me a favor,” I say, against my better judgment. “If in your past life—the one where you tattooed emotion all over your body—you had a drinking problem, don’t drink.” “Why do you care, Senna?” “I don’t,” I say quickly. “But your wife and baby do.” He looks away. “We are going to get out of here eventually.” I sound way more sure than I actually am. “You can’t go back to them all messed up.” “Someone left us here to die,” he says, blandly. “Bullshit.” I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut. I’m feeling queasy again. “All the food … the supplies. Someone wants us to survive.” “Limited food. Limited supplies.” “It doesn’t make sense,” I say. We both stopped messing with the keypad the day I spilled all that nonsense about Adam and Eve. “Maybe we should get back to breaking out of here,” I say. Then I run back to the bathroom and throw up. Later as I lie in my bed, still green-faced and queasy, I decide not to try to help anymore. It’s not my forte. I want to be left alone, I should therefore leave others alone. We pick up our code breaking again, for lack of anything else to do. To stave off boredom I try my hand at reading again. It doesn’t work; I have kidnapped ADD. I like the feel of paper beneath my fingertips. The sound a page makes when it turns over. So I don’t see the words, but I touch the pages and turn them until I’ve finished the book. Isaac sees me doing it one day, and laughs at me. “Why don’t you just read the book?” he asks. “I can’t focus. I want to, but I can’t.” He comes over and takes it from my hands. The sofa yields as he sits down next to me and opens it to the first page. He’s sitting so close our legs are touching. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. I close my eyes and listen to his voice.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But also real choices that are undeniable. We don’t always perceive the difference between the two. Audre: Adrienne, in my journals I have a lot of pieces of conversations that I’m having with you in my head. I’ll be having a conversation with you and I’ll put it in my journal because stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space of Black woman/white woman where it’s beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we’re two voices. Adrienne: You mean the conversations you have in your head and your journal, or the conversations we’re having on this earth? Audre: The conversations that exist in my head that I put in the journal. This piece, I think, is one of them — about the different pitfalls. I’ve never forgotten the impatience in your voice that time on the telephone, when you said, “It’s not enough to say to me that you intuit it.” Do you remember? I will never forget that. Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating. Adrienne: Yes, but it’s not a wipeout of your modus. Because I don’t think my modus in unintuitive, right? And one of the crosses I’ve borne all my life is being told that I’m rational, logical, cool — I am not cool, and I’m not rational and logical in that icy sense. But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” You remember, that telephone conversation was in connection with the essay I was writing on feminism and racism. I was trying to say to you, don’t let’s let this evolve into “You don’t understand me” or “I can’t understand you” or “Yes, of course we understand each other because we love each other.” That’s bullshit. So if I ask for documentation, it’s because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless you show me what you mean. Audre: But I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering. Adrienne: It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive. That’s what I’m trying to say to you . Audre: But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Not only are some of the problems that face us dissimilar, but some of the entrapments and the weapons used to neutralize us are not the same. Adrienne: I wish we could explore this more, about you and me, but also in general. I think it needs to be talked about, written about: the differences in alternatives or choices we are offered as Black and white women. There is a danger of seeing it in an all-or-nothing way. I think it is a very complex thing. White women are constantly offered choices or the appearance of choices. But also real choices that are undeniable. We don’t always perceive the difference between the two. Audre: Adrienne, in my journals I have a lot of pieces of conversations that I’m having with you in my head. I’ll be having a conversation with you and I’ll put it in my journal because stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space of Black woman/white woman where it’s beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we’re two voices. Adrienne: You mean the conversations you have in your head and your journal, or the conversations we’re having on this earth? Audre: The conversations that exist in my head that I put in the journal. This piece, I think, is one of them — about the different pitfalls. I’ve never forgotten the impatience in your voice that time on the telephone, when you said, “It’s not enough to say to me that you intuit it.” Do you remember? I will never forget that. Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating. Adrienne: Yes, but it’s not a wipeout of your modus. Because I don’t think my modus in unintuitive, right? And one of the crosses I’ve borne all my life is being told that I’m rational, logical, cool — I am not cool, and I’m not rational and logical in that icy sense. But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” You remember, that telephone conversation was in connection with the essay I was writing on feminism and racism. I was trying to say to you, don’t let’s let this evolve into “You don’t understand me” or “I can’t understand you” or “Yes, of course we understand each other because we love each other.” That’s bullshit. So if I ask for documentation, it’s because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless you show me what you mean. Audre: But I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Adrienne: It must have been particularly hard since you knew by then that the marriage was going nowhere. It’s like having to defend something that was not in itself defensible. Audre: What I was defending was something that needed defense. And this moved it out of “I’m defending Ed because I want to live with him.” It was, “I’m defending this relationship because we have a right to examine it and try it.” So there’s the northern Black poet making contact with these young southern Black people who are not saying, “This is what we need you for,” but were telling me by who they were what they needed from me. In the poem “Black Studies” * a lot of that starts coming through. Tougaloo laid the foundation for that poem, that knowledge born five years later. My students needed my perception, yet my perception of their need was different from what they were saying. What they were saying aloud was, “We need strong Black people,” but what they were also saying was that their ideas of what strong was had come from our oppressors and didn’t jibe with their feelings at all. It was through poetry that we began to deal with these things — formally. I knew nothing. Adrienne, I had never read a book about poetry! I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro, a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. “Poetry doesn’t sell Cadillacs.” It was the first time I’d ever talked about writing; always before I’d listened — part of my being inarticulate, inscrutable; I didn’t understand in terms of verbalization, and if I did I was too terrified to speak anyway. But at Tougaloo we talked about poetry. And I got the first copies of my book there at Tougaloo. I had never been in this relationship with Black people before. Never. There had been a very uneasy dialogue between me and the Harlem Writers’ Guild where I felt I was tolerated but never really accepted — that I was both crazy and queer but would grow out of it all. Johnny Clarke adopted me because he really loved me, and he’s a kind man. And he taught me wonderful things about Africa. And he said to me, “You are a poet. You are a poet. I don’t understand your poetry but you are a poet, you are.” So I would get this underlining of me. “You’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, but, yes, you can do it and we totally expect you to. You are a bright and shining light. You’re off on a lot of wrong turns — women, the Village, white people, all of this, but you’re young yet. You’ll find your way.” So I would get these double messages, this kind of underlining and rejection at the same time. It reduplicated my family, you see.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I get e-mails from them, but to go this far … I should see a woman. But I don’t. I see a man. Either way, I’m in his head. He’s just a character to me; someone I can’t really see, but I can see how his mind works by the way he’s playing games with me. And the longer I’m here, the more he’s taking form. This is my job; this is what I’m good at. If I can figure out his plot, I can outsmart him. Get Isaac out of here. He needs to meet his baby. 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. 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.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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. 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.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It was terribly costly emotionally. I didn’t have more than one or two Black students in my class. One of them dropped out saying this wasn’t right for him, and I thought, wait a minute, racism doesn’t just distort white people — what about us? What about the effects of white racism upon the ways Black people view each other? Racism internalized? What about Black teachers going into ghetto schools? And I saw there were different problems, that were just as severe, for a Black teacher going into New York City schools after a racist, sexist education. Adrienne: You mean in terms of expectations? Audre: Not just in terms of expectations, but of self-image, in terms of confusion about loyalties. In terms of identifying with the oppressor. And I thought, who is going to start to deal with that? What do you do about it? This was where I wanted to use my energies. Meanwhile, this is 1969, and I’m thinking, what is my place in all this? There were two Black women in the class, and I tried to talk to them about us, as Black women, having to get together. The Black organizations on the campuses were revving up for the spring actions. And the women said, “You are insane, our men need us.” It was a total rejection. “No, we can’t come together as women. We’re Black.” But I had to keep trying to straighten out the threads because I knew the minute I stopped trying to straighten this shit out, it was going to engulf me. So the only hope I had was to work at it, work on all the threads. My love with Frances, Ed, the children, teaching Black students, the women. And in ’69 came the Black and Puerto Rican occupation at City College. Black students outside of class on the barricades. Yolanda and I would bring over soup and blankets and see Black women being fucked on tables and under desks. And while we’d be trying to speak to them as women, all we’d hear is, “The revolution is here, right?” Seeing how Black women were being used and abused was painful — putting those things together. I said, “I want to teach Black students again.” I went to John Jay College and discussed a course with the dean on racism and the urban situation, and he said, “Come teach it.” I taught two courses, that one and another new course I introduced to the English Department, which approached remedial writing through creative writing. It was confrontation teaching. Adrienne: John Jay was largely a police college, right? Audre: It had been a police college, but I began in 1970 after open admissions started, and John Jay was now a four-year senior college with a regular enrollment as well as an enrollment of City uniformed personnel. There were no Black teachers in English or history. Most of our incoming freshmen were Black or Puerto Rican. And my demeanor was very unthreatening.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism. It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance. Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist. Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He’s not in the kitchen. I stand for a moment at the sink where I usually find him looking out the window. The faucet has a drip. I watch it for a minute before turning away. The whiskey we were drinking a few nights ago is still on the counter. I screw off the cap and take a swig straight from the bottle. The lip feels warm. I wonder if Isaac was in here doing the same thing. I flinch, lick my lips and take two more deep sips. I walk boldly up the stairs, swinging my arms as I go. I’ve learned that if you move all of your limbs at once you can chase some of the cold away. Isaac is in the carousel room. I find him sitting on the floor staring up at one of the horses. This is unusual. It’s typically my spot. I slide down the wall until I am sitting next to him and stretch my legs out in front of me. I am already feeling the effects of the whiskey, which makes this easier. “The carousel day,” I say. “Let’s talk about it.” Isaac turns his head to look at me. Instead of avoiding his eyes, I catch and hold them. He has such a piercing gaze. Steely. “I haven’t told anyone that story. I can’t for the life of me figure out how someone would know. That’s why this room seems more like a coincidence,” I say. He doesn’t reply, so I carry on. “You told someone though, didn’t you?” “Yes.” He lied to me. He told me he hadn’t told a soul. Maybe I lied, too. I can’t remember. “Who did you tell, Isaac?” We are breathing together, both sets of eyebrows drawn. “My wife.” I don’t like that word. It makes me think of frilly aprons with apple pattern and blind, submissive love. I look away. I look instead at the death that adorns the horses’ lacquered manes. One horse is black and one is white. The black has the flared nostrils of a racehorse, its head tossed to the side, eyes wide with fear. One leg is furled up like it was mid-stride when sentenced to eternal fiberglass. It is the more striking of the two horses: the determined, angry one. I am endeared to it. Mostly because there is an arrow piercing its heart. “Who did she tell?” “Senna,” he says. “No one. Who would she tell that to?” I push myself to my feet and walk barefoot to the first horse—the black one. I trace the saddle with my pinkie. 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.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  When Maggie entered therapy to deal with the loss of her relationship with a married man, she had no idea her eroticism was on the brink of a radical shift. She fully expected her attractions to remain essentially the same. She just wanted to make them work better. But once she realized that she was “hooked on longing,” that her greatest turn-ons involved “almost being loved,” and that fantasies of fulfillment excited her more than the real thing, she was understandably perplexed. “What do you expect me to do now?” she demanded in exasperation. “I don’t even know which men turn me on anymore. I thought therapy was supposed to make me less confused. I’ve never been so unsure!” Maggie had stumbled into the gray zone and didn’t want to be there. But out of necessity she rallied her considerable inner resources to meet its challenges. She was amazed by a curious phenomenon she named the “dual response.” “When I see the kind of man who has always attracted me,” she explained, “immediately I’m as fascinated as ever. I can spot these guys across a room. But now the moment they grab my attention, something inside me snaps and I feel myself turn off and I think, ‘Yuck! What a jerk!’” This contradictory response is typical in the gray zone. Maggie ultimately discovered that by selecting ambivalent men to pursue she had distracted herself from the fact that she was as ambivalent about intimacy as her lovers. “At least I used to enjoy the chase,” she said. “Now all I see is the same old story with the same shitty ending: poor little Maggie chasing after crumbs. I’ve had it! It’s too damn humiliating.” Maggie’s most important decision was to solidify a policy of self-respect. Her manifesto became: I don’t want to be with anybody who doesn’t want to be with me. “I don’t care if I ever fall in love again,” she insisted. “If he doesn’t love me back, I’m not interested.” For months she dated only sporadically, gingerly sampling different kinds of men and conducting experiments that had been impossible when she was focused on pursuit. Through it all her policy held firm. She had broken the spell of the chase. CHOOSING A MORATORIUMThere are times when it is advantageous to create a gray zone consciously and deliberately by voluntarily abstaining from your usual practices for a period of time—sometimes specified, sometimes not. Freely choosing not to do what you normally do can help you in two ways. First, by stepping back from automatic behaviors you gain a fresh perspective on what your eroticism is trying to accomplish or express. Second, by detaching from well-worn habits you open up space in your erotic landscape for experimentation and self-observation.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Everyone kept a distance from the woman, except Quentin, who took over her case. He actually let her move into his room and sleep in his bed, while he slept on the floor. Then he made a catastrophic mistake. Dennis Erlich, the chief “cramming officer” at Flag, who supervised the upper-level auditors, noted jarring disparities between Quentin’s upbeat reports on Alpe and her glaring lack of progress. Erlich called Quentin in for a meeting. “Quentin, or ‘Q’ as his friends called him, was 22 at the time,” Erlich later wrote. “He looked 15 and acted 5.” During the interview, Quentin continually zoomed his hand through the air and made airplane noises. He calmly told Erlich that he had falsely reported the results. “I think a lot of my father’s stuff doesn’t work,” he said. “So I false report whenever I need to. Personally, I think my father’s crazy.” Not only was Quentin the founder’s son, he was also one of the highest-ranked auditors in the church, and yet he had committed an unpardonable offense. Erlich had no choice but to tell him that he would have to surrender all of his training certificates and start the entire Scientology series all over again—years of work. Quentin seemed completely nonchalant. What happened after this is full of contradiction and mystery. Tracy Ekstrand, who was Quentin’s steward, set a cookie on his bedside table that evening. It was still there the next night. The bed had not been slept in. Erlich was expecting Quentin to show up to go over his new training program, but he didn’t appear that day or the next. Word went out that Quentin had “blown”—in other words, he had fled. He left a confused note, full of references to UFOs, saying that he was going to Area 51, the secret airbase north of Las Vegas, Nevada, where the CIA has developed spy planes; in popular culture, Area 51 was said to be where an alien spacecraft was stored. Quentin had only just learned to drive a car, in the parking garage of the condominium, where he accidentally ran into the wall with such force that the entire building registered the shock. He was scarcely qualified to drive all the way across the country by himself. Quentin had repeatedly requested a leave to take flying lessons, but Hubbard was convinced that Quentin couldn’t be trusted to fly a plane under any circumstances. Frantic, Mary Sue dispatched three hundred Guardian’s Office operatives to find him. Weeks passed, as the Scientologists checked hotels and flying schools in multiple states. A cover story was put out that Quentin had been given flying lessons as a present from his parents, and he was driving to California to fulfill his lifelong ambition.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  How do we keep from releasing our angers at them upon ourselves and each other? How do I free myself from this poison I was force-fed like a Strasburg goose until I vomited anger at the least scent of anything nourishing, oh my sister the belligerent lift of your shoulder the breath of your hair.… We each learned the craft of destruction. It is all they knew to allow us, yet look how our words are finding each other again. It is difficult to construct a wholesomeness model when we are surrounded with synonyms for filth. But not impossible. We have, after all, survived for a reason. (How do I define my impact upon this earth?) I begin by searching for the right questions. Dear Leora, For two Black women to enter an analytic or therapeutic relationship means beginning an essentially uncharted and insecure journey. There are no prototypes, no models, no objectively accessible body of experience other than ourselves by which to examine the specific dynamics of our interactions as Black women. Yet this interaction can affect all the other psychic matter attended profoundly. It is to scrutinize that very interaction that I sought you out professionally, and I have come to see that it means picking my way through our similarities and our differences, as well as through our histories of calculated mistrust and desire. Because it has not been done before or at least not been noted, this particular scrutiny is painful and fraught with the vulnerability of all psychic scrutinies plus all of the pitfalls created by our being Black women in a white male world, and Black women who have survived. This is a scrutiny often sidestepped or considered unimportant or beside the point. EXAMPLE: I can’t tell you how many good white psychwomen have said to me, “Why should it matter if I am Black or white?” who would never think of saying, “Why does it matter if I am female or male?” EXAMPLE: I don’t know who you are in supervision with, but I can bet it’s not with another Black woman. So this territory between us feels new and frightening as well as urgent, rigged with detonating pieces of our own individual racial histories which neither of us chose but which each of us bears the scars from. And those are particular to each of us. But there is a history which we share because we are Black women in a racist sexist cauldron, and that means some part of this journey is yours, also.

• From Between Us

  There is a big gap between recognizing amae or gezellig in a neatly carved-out emblem or in one situation where your friend points out what the emotion is, and having a lifelong stock of stories. Research with second-language speakers suggests just this. English speakers learning Russian did not have any trouble learning the meaning of the verb perezhivat: to experience something keenly, to worry, to suffer things through. Yet they failed to use the term in places where Russian natives did, in part because they “were not sure about its range of reference and the contexts to which it might apply.” Even if you get a sense of the concept, you do not live that emotion without having had the experiences to furnish the concept. It is easier to recognize that your grasp of exotic emotion words falls short than it is for emotion words that do have translations in your own language—and yet your concept falls short there too. Ker (Ifaluk) can be translated as “happy,” but the emotion of ker is despised among Ifaluk, whereas happy is a desirable emotion in English. Very different cultural episodes are associated with these concepts. Ikari and haji in Japanese can be translated as “anger” and “shame,” respectively, in English, but that does not mean that they come with the same stories. So, even if there is a good translation of an emotion word in your own language, it does not mean that you share either a history, or the cultural lore of an emotion concept. We make sense of our emotions differently, we connect them to, and furnish them with different cultural episodes. I would once have said that the emotions are the same, even if the stories are not. But what are the emotions if not their stories? Even considering a MINE model of emotions, the feeling of (despised) ker can hardly be said to be the same as the feeling of (desirable) happiness. And from an OURS perspective on emotions, “doing” ker is different from “doing” happiness. The stories or scripts are the emotions. Influencing Others Within a culture, emotion concepts enable you to communicate with other people in your culture: first your parents, and then a widening circle of people. By naming my emotion, I am invoking the cultural episodes that go with that emotion, as we all know them, to influence you and our relationship. Which episodes will come online depends on our relationship and on the particular context, but by talking about my emotion, I am piggybacking on all the things you and I, and many other people in our culture, know about these emotions.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  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. I didn’t know I needed someone to dig into my heart and figure out why on some days I wanted to play, and why on others I craved solitude. I didn’t even like it when he did it.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Haggis locked it in the briefcase, which was lashed to his arm. Then he entered a secure study room and bolted the door behind him. At last, he was able to examine the religion’s highest mysteries, revealed in a couple of pages of Hubbard’s handwritten scrawl. After a few minutes, Haggis returned to the supervisor. “I don’t understand,” Haggis said. “Do you know the words?” “I know the words, I just don’t understand.” “Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested. Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked. “No,” the supervisor responded. “It is what it is. Do the actions that are required.” Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, “This is madness.” 1 It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology’s premier Celebrity Centre. 2 Hubbard sometimes disparaged the term “lie detector” in connection with E-Meters. “In the first place they do not detect lies and in the second place the police have known too little about the human mind to know that their instrument was actually accurate to an amazing perfection. These instruments should be called ‘emotion detectors’ ” (Hubbard, “Electropsychometric Auditing Operator’s Manual,” 1952). According to David S. Touretzky, a research professor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (and a prominent Scientology critic), what are called “thoughts” are actually “fleeting patterns of chemical and electrical activity in our brains” that have no actual mass. “The meter is really more of a prop or talisman than a measuring instrument. Interpreting needle movements is like reading tea leaves. A good fortune-teller picks up on lots of subliminal cues that let them ‘read’ their subject, while the tea leaves give the subject something to fixate on. And the subject is heavily invested in believing that the auditor and the meter are effective, so it’s a mutually reinforcing system.” The E-Meter measures skin resistance, like a lie detector. “Strong emotional reactions do cause changes in muscle tension or micro-tremors of the fingers will also cause changes in the current flowing to the meter, so it’s not purely measuring the physiological changes associated with skin resistance like a real lie detector would. (And real lie detectors also look at other variables, such as pulse and respiration rates.)” (David Touretzky, personal correspondence.) 2 Source The many discrepancies between Hubbard’s legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he genuinely was a fascinating man: an explorer, a best-selling author, and the founder of a worldwide religious movement.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Racism internalized? What about Black teachers going into ghetto schools? And I saw there were different problems, that were just as severe, for a Black teacher going into New York City schools after a racist, sexist education. Adrienne: You mean in terms of expectations? Audre: Not just in terms of expectations, but of self-image, in terms of confusion about loyalties. In terms of identifying with the oppressor. And I thought, who is going to start to deal with that? What do you do about it? This was where I wanted to use my energies. Meanwhile, this is 1969, and I’m thinking, what is my place in all this? There were two Black women in the class, and I tried to talk to them about us, as Black women, having to get together. The Black organizations on the campuses were revving up for the spring actions. And the women said, “You are insane, our men need us.” It was a total rejection. “No, we can’t come together as women. We’re Black.” But I had to keep trying to straighten out the threads because I knew the minute I stopped trying to straighten this shit out, it was going to engulf me. So the only hope I had was to work at it, work on all the threads. My love with Frances, Ed, the children, teaching Black students, the women. And in ’69 came the Black and Puerto Rican occupation at City College. Black students outside of class on the barricades. Yolanda and I would bring over soup and blankets and see Black women being fucked on tables and under desks. And while we’d be trying to speak to them as women, all we’d hear is, “The revolution is here, right?” Seeing how Black women were being used and abused was painful — putting those things together. I said, “I want to teach Black students again.” I went to John Jay College and discussed a course with the dean on racism and the urban situation, and he said, “Come teach it.” I taught two courses, that one and another new course I introduced to the English Department, which approached remedial writing through creative writing. It was confrontation teaching. Adrienne: John Jay was largely a police college, right? Audre: It had been a police college, but I began in 1970 after open admissions started, and John Jay was now a four-year senior college with a regular enrollment as well as an enrollment of City uniformed personnel. There were no Black teachers in English or history. Most of our incoming freshmen were Black or Puerto Rican. And my demeanor was very unthreatening. Adrienne: I’ve seen your demeanor at John Jay and it was not unthreatening, but that was a bit later … Audre: … and also, I was a Black woman. So then I came in and started this course and really meant business. And it was very heavily attended. A lot of Black and white policemen registered for it.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  When I spoke my voice sounded charred. “There is a book on my nightstand, next to my bed. Can you get it for me next time you—” “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” he said. “Your cell phone is there.” He pointed to the table next to my bed. I had no need for a cell phone, so I didn’t look. “I have to do rounds. Call me if you need anything.” I nodded, half wishing he’d leave a business card like the old days. True to his word, the next day Isaac brought me Nick’s book. I held it in my hands for a long time before I had a nurse put it on my hospital nightstand. Old habits die hard. Isaac came to check on me after his shift ended. He was out of his scrubs and wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. The nurses twittered when he walked in dressed that way. He looked closer to a drummer than a doctor. He sat on my bed. But he was not a doctor this time. He was a drummer. I wondered if drummer Isaac was very different than doctor Isaac. He reached for the book and picked it up, turning it over in his hands. My eyes followed the tattoos on his forearm. It felt strange to see Nick’s book in Isaac’s hands. He studied it for a while, then he said, “Do you want me to read it to you?” I didn’t answer him, so he opened it to the first chapter. He breezed right past the dedication page without even looking. Bravo, I thought. Good for you. When he started reading, I wanted to scream at him to stop. I was tempted to cover my ears. To refuse the assault of a book written to make me hurt. But I did neither. I listened, instead, to Isaac Asterholder read the words that the love of my life wrote to me. And they went like this… Part Three Anger and Bargaining “Is this you, Senna?” He was looking at me intensely. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew what I was thinking: Damn Nick and his book. I could barely … I didn’t know how to … My thoughts were trembling out of my hands. “You’re shaking,” Isaac said. He set the book on the nightstand and poured me a glass of water. The cup was one of those heavy plastic things, the color of too many colors of Play-Doh mixed together. It grossed me out, but I took it and sipped. The cup felt too heavy. Some of the water spilled down the front of my hospital gown, plastering it to my skin. I handed the cup back to Isaac, who set it aside without taking his eyes off my face.

• 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 The Erotic Mind (1995)

  When Maggie entered therapy to deal with the loss of her relationship with a married man, she had no idea her eroticism was on the brink of a radical shift. She fully expected her attractions to remain essentially the same. She just wanted to make them work better. But once she realized that she was “hooked on longing,” that her greatest turn-ons involved “almost being loved,” and that fantasies of fulfillment excited her more than the real thing, she was understandably perplexed. “What do you expect me to do now?” she demanded in exasperation. “I don’t even know which men turn me on anymore. I thought therapy was supposed to make me less confused. I’ve never been so unsure!” Maggie had stumbled into the gray zone and didn’t want to be there. But out of necessity she rallied her considerable inner resources to meet its challenges. She was amazed by a curious phenomenon she named the “dual response.” “When I see the kind of man who has always attracted me,” she explained, “immediately I’m as fascinated as ever. I can spot these guys across a room. But now the moment they grab my attention, something inside me snaps and I feel myself turn off and I think, ‘Yuck! What a jerk!’” This contradictory response is typical in the gray zone. Maggie ultimately discovered that by selecting ambivalent men to pursue she had distracted herself from the fact that she was as ambivalent about intimacy as her lovers. “At least I used to enjoy the chase,” she said. “Now all I see is the same old story with the same shitty ending: poor little Maggie chasing after crumbs. I’ve had it! It’s too damn humiliating.” Maggie’s most important decision was to solidify a policy of self-respect. Her manifesto became: I don’t want to be with anybody who doesn’t want to be with me. “I don’t care if I ever fall in love again,” she insisted. “If he doesn’t love me back, I’m not interested.” For months she dated only sporadically, gingerly sampling different kinds of men and conducting experiments that had been impossible when she was focused on pursuit. Through it all her policy held firm. She had broken the spell of the chase. CHOOSING A MORATORIUMThere are times when it is advantageous to create a gray zone consciously and deliberately by voluntarily abstaining from your usual practices for a period of time—sometimes specified, sometimes not. Freely choosing not to do what you normally do can help you in two ways. First, by stepping back from automatic behaviors you gain a fresh perspective on what your eroticism is trying to accomplish or express. Second, by detaching from well-worn habits you open up space in your erotic landscape for experimentation and self-observation.

• From Between Us

  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. For a Turkish immigrant, there may be a point where they do not only learn Dutch words, but also learn the associated meanings. “Resigned” will become an emotion that marks the lack of personal control, rather than accepting one’s place in the world. “Embarrassment” will become an emotion that underlines the dependence on others’ judgment, rather than the awareness of one’s modest social position. And “jealousy” will become selfish, rather than a justified response to threats to the relationship. These concepts take on new meaning, because the social realities they reflect are different. Ironically, it may be the difficulty of recognizing that linguistic equivalents do not refer to the same “emotions” that clouds our understanding of the emotions of a person from another culture. Having translations available, even imperfect ones, may seduce us to think that deep inside people from other cultures have the “same emotions.” It is this same difficulty that may account for the reluctance of many scientists to recognize cultural differences in emotions. The Tango and the Waltz