Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  “What?” I said, “you let him beat you up?” “I don’t ask him to,” she said, “but you know how quick-tempered he is. I don’t let anybody else sock me but somehow coming from him I don’t mind it so much. Sometimes it makes me feel good inside. . . . I don’t know, maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in a while. It doesn’t hurt so much, if you really like a guy. And afterwards he’s so damned gentle—I almost feel ashamed of myself. . . .” It isn’t often you get a cunt who’ll admit such things—I mean a regular cunt and not a moron. There was Trix Miranda, for example, and her sister, Mrs. Costello. A fine pair of birds they were. Trix, who was going with my friend MacGregor, tried to pretend to her own sister, with whom she was living, that she had no sexual relations with MacGregor. And the sister was pretending to all and sundry that she was frigid, that she couldn’t have any relations with a man even if she wanted to, because she was “built too small.” And meanwhile my friend MacGregor was fucking them silly, both of them, and they both knew about each other but still they lied like that to each other. Why? I couldn’t make it out. The Costello bitch was hysterical; whenever she felt that she wasn’t getting a fair percentage of the lays that MacGregor was handing out she’d throw a pseudo-epileptic fit. That meant throwing towels over her, patting her wrists, opening her bosom, chafing her legs and finally hoisting her upstairs to bed where my friend MacGregor would look after her as soon as he had put the other one to sleep. Sometimes the two sisters would lie down together to take a nap of an afternoon; if MacGregor were around he would go upstairs and lie between them. As he explained it to me laughingly, the trick was for him to pretend to go to sleep. He would lie there breathing heavily, opening now one eye, now the other, to see which one was really dozing off. As soon as he was convinced that one of them was asleep he’d tackle the other. On such occasions he seemed to prefer the hysterical sister, Mrs. Costello, whose husband visited her about once every six months. The more risk he ran, the more thrill he got out of it, he said. If it were with the other sister, Trix, whom he was supposed to be courting, he had to pretend that it would be terrible if the other one were to catch them like that, and at the same time, he admitted to me, he was always hoping that the other one would wake up and catch them.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Identifying these dual identities is often confusing for relatives and friends of cult members. This is especially true in the early weeks or months of the person’s cult involvement, when their new identity is most obvious. One moment the person is speaking cultic jargon with a hostile or elitist know-it-all attitude. Then, without warning, they seem to become their old self, with their old attitudes and mannerisms. Just as suddenly, they flip back to the cult identity. (This behavior is very obvious to anyone who works with cult members.) For the sake of convenience, we can call these dual identities John or Jane (when the person is most themself) and John-cultist or Jane-cultist (when functioning as a cult clone). Ordinarily, only one of these two selves occupies the person’s consciousness at a time. However, the personality on duty most of the time is the cult identity. Only intermittently does the old self reappear. It is essential for family members to sensitize themselves to the differences between the two identity patterns, in terms of both content (what the person talks about) and communication patterns (the ways they speak and act). Each looks and sounds distinctively different. When John or Jane-cultist is talking, speech is robotic, or like a tape recording of a cult lecture—what I call a “tape loop.” They will speak with inappropriate intensity and volume. Their posture will typically be more rigid, facial muscles tighter. Their eyes will tend to strike family members as glassy, cold or glazed, and they will often seem to stare through people. On the other hand, when the authentic John or Jane is talking, they will speak with a greater range of emotion. They will be more expressive and will share feelings more willingly. They will be more spontaneous, and may even show a sense of humor. Their posture and musculature will appear to be looser and warmer. Eye contact with them will be more natural. Such a stark description of a divided personality may seem overly simplistic, but it is remarkably accurate. It’s an eerie experience to be talking with someone and sense that, mid-sentence, a different identity has taken over their body. As you will see in later chapters, recognizing the change and acting appropriately is the key to unlocking the person’s real self and freeing them from the cult’s bondage. As much as cult indoctrination attempts to destroy and suppress the old identity, and empower the new one, it almost never totally succeeds. Good experiences and positive memories rarely disappear entirely. The cult identity will try to bury former reference points and submerge the person’s past. Yet, over time, the old self will eventually exert itself and seek ways to regain freedom. This process is speeded up by positive exposure to non-members and the accumulation of bad experiences the person has while in the group. The real identity deep down—the hardware (self) beneath the mind control virus—sees and records contradictions, questions, and disillusioning experiences.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  To ready a person for radical change, their reality must first be shaken up. Their indoctrinators must confuse and disorient them. Their frames of reference for understanding themselves and their surroundings must be challenged and broken down. Upsetting their view of reality disarms their natural defenses against concepts that challenge that reality. Unfreezing can be accomplished through a variety of approaches. Disorienting a person physiologically can be very effective. Sleep deprivation is one of the most common and powerful techniques for breaking a person down. In addition, new diets and eating schedules can also have a disorienting effect. Some groups use low-protein, high-sugar diets, or prolonged underfeeding, to undermine a person’s physical integrity. Unfreezing is most effectively accomplished in a totally controlled environment, like an isolated country estate, but it can also be accomplished in more familiar and easily accessible places, such as a hotel ballroom. Hypnotic processes constitute another powerful tool for unfreezing and side-stepping a person’s defense mechanisms. One particularly effective hypnotic technique involves the deliberate use of confusion to induce a trance state. Confusion usually results whenever contradictory information is communicated congruently. For example, if a hypnotist says in an authoritative tone of voice, “The more you try to understand what I am saying, the less you will never be able to understand it. Do you understand?” the result is a state of temporary confusion. If you read it over and over again, you may conclude that the statement is simply contradictory and nonsensical. However, if a person is kept in a controlled environment long enough, and is repeatedly fed such disorienting language and confusing information, they will usually suspend their critical judgment and adapt to what everyone else is doing. In such an environment, the tendency of most people is to doubt themselves and defer to the group. Sensory overload, like sensory deprivation, can also effectively disrupt a person’s balance and make them more open to suggestion. A person can easily be bombarded by emotionally laden material at a rate faster than they can digest it. The result is a feeling of being overwhelmed. The mind snaps into neutral and ceases to evaluate the material pouring in. The newcomer may think this is happening spontaneously within themselves, but the cult has intentionally structured it that way. Other hypnotic techniques, such as double binds,90 can also be used to help unfreeze a person’s sense of reality. A double bind forces a person to do what the controller wants while giving an illusion of choice. For example, a cult leader may say, “For those people who are having doubts about what I am telling you, you should know that I am the one putting those doubts inside your mind, so that you will see the truth that I am the true teacher.” Whether the person believes or doubts the leader, both bases are covered.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Many theories about what the cross achieved, including some of the most popular and vocal, have made both of these mistakes. They have insisted, like the Boy Scouts with the old lady, that the human race really needed help to go to “heaven,” when all along the New Testament was insisting that the divine plan was “to sum up . . . everything in heaven and on earth” in the Messiah. And they have insisted on a particular diagnosis of the human plight and have treated that rather than the real disease. These two mistakes have reinforced one another. In most popular Christianity, “heaven” (and “fellowship with God” in the present) is the goal, and “sin” (bad behavior, deserving punishment) is the problem. A Platonized goal and a moralizing diagnosis—and together they lead, as I have been suggesting, to a paganized “solution” in which an angry divinity is pacified by human sacrifice. The zealous theological Boy Scouts have gotten it wrong. Humans are made not for “heaven,” but for the new heavens and new earth. And the equally zealous theological doctors have produced the wrong diagnosis. The human problem is not so much “sin” seen as the breaking of moral codes—though that, to be sure, is part of it, just as the headaches and blurry vision really were part of the medical problem—but rather idolatry and the distortion of genuine humanness it produces. These two mistakes go together, reinforcing the basic heaven-and-earth dualism that continues to haunt Western theology. They lead some to suppose that the human problem has to do, after all, with our “earthly” and “bodily” selves and that our ultimate aim is for our “souls” to escape this body and find rest in an existence outside space, time, and matter altogether. I have argued elsewhere, and will continue here, that this is highly misleading. The “goal” is not “heaven,” but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward. In particular, much thinking and preaching about the cross has assumed a tradition that, in the seventeenth century, came to be known by some as the “covenant of works.” This idea, enshrined in the famous 1646 Westminster Confession, is central to much popular belief. Here we must be careful. There are many varieties of Protestantism, and even many varieties of “Reformed” doctrine within that larger category. Some of the varieties have seen the same problems that I see here and have responded in ways not too far, though still different, from what I am recommending. Some of those who agree with me in wanting to avoid those problems have used the phrase “covenant of works” in a way significantly different from the view I am opposing. Laying all that out would be a task for another time, and I shall try to avoid getting tangled up in all this by referring to the view I am opposing as the “works contract.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  By the time the phrase returns to the sender, it bears little relationship to the original.” “Which means that listening is not recording,” Ron said, coming down hard on each word. “ Listening is a creative process. That’s why the analytic pretense that psychoanalysis is a science always rankles me. It cannot be a science, since science demands accurate measuring of reliable external data. In therapy that’s not possible, because listening is creative—the therapist’s mind distorts as it measures.” “We all know we err,” Ernest gleefully charged in, “unless we’re silly enough to believe in immaculate perception .” Since reading that phrase somewhere a few weeks before, he had been itching to use it in conversation. Dr. Werner, never one to shrink from a debate, was unfazed by his students’ barrage and responded confidently, “Don’t be blinded by the false goal of absolute identity between speaker’s thoughts and listener’s perceptions. The best we can hope for is mere approximation. But tell me,” he asked, “is there anyone here, even my iconoclastic Katzenjammer duo”—nodding toward Ron and Ernest—”who doubts that a well-integrated individual is more likely to apprehend accurately a speaker’s intent than, let us say, a paranoid individual who reads portents of personal danger into every communication? Personally, I believe we’re selling ourselves short with this breast-beating lament about our inability to really know the other or to reconstruct the other’s past. This humility has led you, Dr. Lash, into the dubious practice of focusing exclusively on the here-and-now.” “How so?” Ernest asked coolly. “Because you, of all our participants, are most skeptical about accurate recall and the entire process of reconstructing a patient’s past. And I think you carry it so far that you confuse your patient. Yes, the past is undoubtedly elusive and undoubtedly shifts according to a patient’s mood, and undoubtedly our theoretical beliefs influence what one recalls, but I still believe that underneath it all there is a valid subtext, a true answer to the question, ‘Did my brother hit me when I was three?’” “A valid subtext is an antiquated illusion,” Ernest retorted. “There is no valid answer to that question. Its context—whether he hit you purposefully or playfully, or gave you a mere tap or a knockout punch—is lost forever.” “Right,” Ron cut in. “Or whether he hit you in self-defense—in response to your hitting him a moment before? Or in defense of your sister? Or because he had just been punished by your mother for something you did?” “There is no valid subtext,” Ernest repeated. “It’s all interpretation. As Nietzsche knew a century ago.” “Aren’t we straying from the intent of this conference?” interrupted Barbara, one of the group’s two woman members. “Last time I looked, it was called a countertransference seminar.” She turned to Dr.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The problem was, if you’re lying there like a starfish letting the universe seep through your pores, all kinds of stuff can get in. How do you keep out the bad things? “Don’t be such a Christian,” said Franklin. “Things aren’t good or bad; they just are.” Well, that was a whole other line of thought. She pictured it as a wriggly, purple organism entering her space, and brusquely pushed it away. She tried to imagine a selective gray force field coming down at the various points on her body where the bad things were trying to enter. She became confused. Franklin wasn’t altogether wrong. Buddhists and other people agreed with him. Anyway, even if you didn’t agree with him, how could you tell for sure which things were bad? The tiny rubber hose sucking the spit from her mouth felt bad to her, as did the sound of the drill. But they weren’t inherently bad, they were just dry and shrill. How did dryness and shrillness translate in terms of the universe? Surely these elements were affecting her nitrous oxide experience, but how? Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?” Then there were the basic things. She thought of Deana’s soft, slightly fleshy embrace, the pale skin, the severe mouth, the tilt-eyed, heavy-framed glasses that made the composed, dignified face almost ludicrous. This was also one of the basic things: to lie in the dark under a blanket in an embrace with a tender lover, to have the sensations and their emotional entourage that came under the heading “sex.” This was something that she contemplated with a feeling almost like relief, similar to how an exhausted person would view a vast, infinitely trustworthy pillow. You know what this is, everybody does. Like everybody knows what “job” and “success” mean. People who struggle for success are doing a primal thing. She had read something once about lab rats fighting for dominance, even under conditions where cooperation was needed for survival. She thought of herself at her desk reviewing manuscripts. She saw herself on the phone, talking to the editor of a piece that she’d recently completed. She felt detached as she viewed these images, which seemed more abstract than snapshots in a slide projector. They were like reminders scrawled on the square white days of a calendar. Like the imperative “call Fangelli for appt.,” they were merely the most visible emblems, the crudest symbols for something too complex to describe in the given space. The image of herself at her desk, typing, became a scrawled notation for “job,” but job was only another notation for something she barely sensed as a dark area of elements crossing and recrossing one another in an unreadable grid.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The hood was a complete sensory overload for me, but within the chaos there was order, a system, a social hierarchy based on where you lived. First Avenue was not cool at all because it was right next to the commotion of the minibus rank. Second Avenue was nice because it had semi-houses that were built when there was still some sort of formal settlement going on. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues were nicer—for the township. These were the established families, the old money. Then from Sixth Avenue on down it got really shitty, more shacks and shanties. There were some schools, a few soccer fields. There were a couple of hostels, giant projects built by the government for housing migrant workers. You never wanted to go there. That’s where the serious gangsters were. You only went there if you needed to buy an AK-47. After Twentieth Avenue you hit the Jukskei River, and on the far side of that, across the Roosevelt Street Bridge, was East Bank, the newest, nicest part of the hood. East Bank was where the government had gone in, cleared out the squatters and their shacks, and started to build actual homes. It was still low-income housing, but decent two-bedroom houses with tiny yards. The families who lived there had a bit of money and usually sent their kids out of the hood to better schools, like Sandringham. Bongani’s parents lived in East Bank, at the corner of Roosevelt and Springbok Crescent, and after walking from the minibus rank through the hood, we wound up there, hanging around outside his house on the low brick wall down the middle of Springbok Crescent, doing nothing, shooting the shit. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to spend the next three years of my life hanging out at that very spot. — I graduated from high school when I was seventeen, and by that point life at home had become toxic because of my stepfather. I didn’t want to be there anymore, and my mom agreed that I should move out. She helped me move to a cheap, roach-infested flat in a building down the road. My plan, insofar as I had one, was to go to university to be a computer programmer, but we couldn’t afford the tuition. I needed to make money. The only way I knew how to make money was selling pirated CDs, and one of the best places to sell CDs was in the hood, because that’s where the minibus rank was. Minibus drivers were always looking for new songs because having good music was something they used to attract customers.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The strange thing was that when Fufi got kicked she never yelped or cried. When the vet diagnosed her as deaf, he also found out she had some condition where she didn’t have a fully developed sense of touch. She didn’t feel pain. Which was why she would always start over with Abel like it was a new day. He’d kick her, she’d hide, then she’d be right back the next morning, wagging her tail. “Hey. I’m here. I’ll give you another chance.” And he always got the second chance. The Abel who was likable and charming never went away. He had a drinking problem, but he was a nice guy. We had a family. Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that’s not how people are. There was an undercurrent of terror that ran through the house, but the actual beatings themselves were not that frequent. I think if they had been, the situation would have ended sooner. Ironically, the good times in between were what allowed it to drag out and escalate as far as it did. He hit my mom once, then the next time was three years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was two years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was a year later, and it was just a little bit worse. It was sporadic enough to where you’d think it wouldn’t happen again, but it was frequent enough that you never forgot it was possible. There was a rhythm to it. I remember one time, after one terrible incident, nobody spoke to him for over a month. No words, no eye contact, no conversations, nothing. We moved through the house as strangers, at different times. Complete silent treatment. Then one morning you’re in the kitchen and there’s a nod. “Hey.” “Hey.” Then a week later it’s “Did you see the thing on the news?” “Yeah.” Then the next week there’s a joke and a laugh. Slowly, slowly, life goes back to how it was. Six months, a year later, you do it all again. — One afternoon I came home from Sandringham and my mom was very upset and worked up. “This man is unbelievable,” she said. “What happened?” “He bought a gun.” “What? A gun? What do you mean, ‘He bought a gun’?” A gun was such a ridiculous thing in my world. In my mind, only cops and criminals had guns. Abel had gone out and bought a 9mm Parabellum Smith & Wesson. Sleek and black, menacing. It didn’t look cool like guns in movies. It looked like it killed things. “Why did he buy a gun?” I asked. “I don’t know.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  It is telling that the Manichean threat called forth Augustine’s tract On the Free Choice of the Will, a work whose princi- pal agenda is to exonerate God by assigning the origins of evil to human will, which Augustine already in this early work, more clearly than any of his pre de ces sors, construes as a faculty rather than a condition of being. It is equally telling that within a few years the Pelagians will attempt to throw Augustine’s own arguments back in his face and accuse him of being, under the bishop’s cloak, still a Manichean.  Th e primitive embrace of free will would crumble in the generations on either side of AD 400, in the period of rapid Christianization. Two blows were to bring the edifi ce tumbling to the ground. Th ough in very diff erent ways, both arose from the expansion of the church and the need to recon- cile the religion with mainstream society. Th e fi rst was the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians, a theological controversy that unraveled with astonishing force in the 410s. Th e polemics over original sin had little pur- chase in the Greek- speaking east, though Augustinian pessimism would be offi cially ratifi ed as orthodox doctrine at the Council of Ephesus. But the triumph of original sin over Pelagian optimism undercut the ancient mod- els of free will, ultimately providing a new model of “the will” as a faculty lodged in the fl esh and disobedient to reason. Th e stakes of the debate were so high, not least because “Pelagius and Augustine were both religious ge- niuses. Both made unambiguous sense of a conglomerate of ideas and atti- tudes which men of a previous age had been content to leave undefi ned. Both men were revolutionaries, and the controversy which followed their disagree- ment, far from being a purely academic wrangle, was a crisis in which the spiritual landscape of Western Christendom can be clearly seen for the fi rst time.” In the course of the Pelagian debate, human sexuality, which had for centuries of Christian apologetics been a paradigm of human freedom, rap- idly becomes, in the hands of Augustine, the paradigm of human bondage to the fl esh. Th at Augustine was capable of rebuilding entrenched Christian assumptions out of the elements of Christian orthodoxy in so short a space of time is testimony not only to his individual genius but also to the subtly rearranged position of the church in the world.  Th e Pelagian debates erupted unexpectedly, and at fi rst murkily, out of a brew of unsettled questions, which guaranteed that the storm was to be a multidimensional aff air.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “You tell me.” “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Her voice was small and pathetic. “Part of it is that you don’t talk when you should, and then you talk too much when you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.” In confusion, she reviewed the various moments they had spent together, trying to classify them in terms of whether or not it had been appropriate to speak, and to rate her performance accordingly. Her confusion increased. Tears floated on her eyes. She curled her body against his. “You’re hurting my feelings,” she said, “but I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.” He was briefly touched. “Accidental pain,” he said musingly. He took her head in both hands and pushed it between his legs. She opened her mouth compliantly. He had hurt her after all, he reflected. She was confused and exhausted, and at this instant, anyway, she was doing what he wanted her to do. Still, it wasn’t enough. He released her and she moved upward to lie on top of him, resting her head on his shoulder. She spoke dreamily. “I would do anything with you.” “You would not. You would be disgusted.” “Disgusted by what?” “You would be disgusted if I even told you.” She rolled away from him. “It’s probably nothing.” “Have you ever been pissed on?” He gloated as he felt her body tighten. “No.” “Well, that’s what I want to do to you.” “On your grandmother’s rug?” “I want you to drink it. If any got on the rug, you’d clean it up.” “Oh.” “I knew you’d be shocked.” “I’m not. I just never wanted to do it.” “So? That isn’t any good to me.” In fact, she was shocked. Then she was humiliated, and not in the way she had planned. Her seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad. “Do you like people to piss on you?” she asked. “Yeah. Last month I met this great girl at Billy’s Topless. She pissed in my face for only twenty bucks.” His voice was high-pitched and stupidly aggressive, like some weird kid who would walk up to you on the street and offer to take care of your sexual needs. How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art? “There’s a lot of other things I’d like to do too,” he said with odd self-righteousness. “But I don’t think you could handle it.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I really don’t know.” Her voice was small and pathetic. “Part of it is that you don’t talk when you should, and then you talk too much when you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.” In confusion, she reviewed the various moments they had spent together, trying to classify them in terms of whether or not it had been appropriate to speak, and to rate her performance accordingly. Her confusion increased. Tears floated on her eyes. She curled her body against his. “You’re hurting my feelings,” she said, “but I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.” He was briefly touched. “Accidental pain,” he said musingly. He took her head in both hands and pushed it between his legs. She opened her mouth compliantly. He had hurt her after all, he reflected. She was confused and exhausted, and at this instant, anyway, she was doing what he wanted her to do. Still, it wasn’t enough. He released her and she moved upward to lie on top of him, resting her head on his shoulder. She spoke dreamily. “I would do anything with you.” “You would not. You would be disgusted.” “Disgusted by what?” “You would be disgusted if I even told you.” She rolled away from him. “It’s probably nothing.” “Have you ever been pissed on?” He gloated as he felt her body tighten. “No.” “Well, that’s what I want to do to you.” “On your grandmother’s rug?” “I want you to drink it. If any got on the rug, you’d clean it up.” “Oh.” “I knew you’d be shocked.” “I’m not. I just never wanted to do it.” “So? That isn’t any good to me.” In fact, she was shocked. Then she was humiliated, and not in the way she had planned. Her seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad. “Do you like people to piss on you?” she asked. “Yeah. Last month I met this great girl at Billy’s Topless. She pissed in my face for only twenty bucks.” His voice was high-pitched and stupidly aggressive, like some weird kid who would walk up to you on the street and offer to take care of your sexual needs.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There is another man who was her father and I see him with a string of race horses, or sometimes in a little inn just outside Vienna; rather I see him on the roof of the inn flying kites to while the time away. And between this man who was her father and the man with whom she was madly in love I can make no separation. He is someone in her life about whom she would rather not talk, but just the same she comes back to him all the time, and though I’m not sure that it was not the man who lifted up her dress neither am I sure that it wasn’t the man who committed suicide. Perhaps it’s the man whom she started to talk about when we sat down to eat. Just as we were sitting down I remember now that she began to talk rather hectically about a man whom she had just seen entering the cafeteria. She even mentioned his name, but I forgot it immediately. But I remember her saying that she had lived with him and that he had done something which she didn’t like—she didn’t say what—and so she had walked out on him, left him flat, without a word of explanation. And then, just as we were entering the chop suey joint, they ran into each other and she was still trembling over it as we sat down in the little booth. . . . For one long moment I have the most uneasy sensation. Maybe every word she uttered was a lie! Not an ordinary lie, no, something worse, something indescribable. Only sometimes the truth comes out like that too, especially if you think you’re never going to see the person again. Sometimes you can tell a perfect stranger what you would never dare reveal to your most intimate friend. It’s like going to sleep in the midst of a party; you become so interested in yourself that you go to sleep. And when you’re sound asleep you begin to talk to someone, someone who was in the same room with you all the time and therefore understands everything even though you begin in the middle of a sentence. And perhaps this other person goes to sleep also, or was always asleep, and that’s why it was so easy to encounter him, and if he doesn’t say anything to disturb you then you know that what you are saying is real and true and that you are wide-awake and there is no other reality except this being wide-awake asleep.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  To chew while thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, gives the necessary social cast from which you look out the window and see that even human kind can be slaughtered justly, or maimed, or starved, or tortured because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair with clothes on, wiping the mouth with a napkin, enables you to comprehend what the wisest men have never been able to comprehend, namely that there is no other way of life possible, said wise men often disdaining to use chair, clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying through a cunty cleft of a street called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of this or that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts. The meat balls devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the twenty-four- carat sparkle and fall in with the theater pack. This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a part of life too, like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When is it life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders on and I remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten, the coffee was lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid. The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next. At the corner the blind man stops again and plays “Home to Our Mountains.” I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket—I chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I belong and I don’t belong.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I felt that I had made an imperceptible switch into another realm, a realm of tougher, more elastic fiber, which the most horrible truth was powerless to destroy. I sat down to write her a letter telling her that I was so miserable over the thought of losing her that I had decided to begin a book about her, a book which would immortalize her. It would be a book, I said, such as no one had ever seen before. I rambled on ecstatically, and in the midst of it I suddenly broke off to ask myself why I was so happy. Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her—and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an “end” is intolerable to me. Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and remorseless. We can know the truth and accept it, or we can refuse the knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again. In this manner it is possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom. And if we pursue this road far enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe itself fall apart. For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have started out I have chosen a different route. I am like an explorer who, wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it unnecessary to carry even a compass. Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over, am outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too exhausted to enter. And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story is situated eludes me perpetually. Always in sight it nevertheless remains unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds. From the soaring, crenelated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in steady, wedge-shaped formation. With the tips of their blue-white wings they brush the dreams that dazzle my vision. My feet move confusedly; no sooner do I gain a foothold than I am lost again. I wander aimlessly, trying to gain a solid, unshakable foothold whence I can command a view of my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a groping, confused, encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just been lopped off.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Often in my dreams I take the draught of forgetfulness, as it is called, and I wander forlorn and desperate, seeking the body and the name which is mine. And sometimes between the dream and reality there is only the thinnest line. Sometimes while a person is talking to me I step out of my shoes and, like a plant drifting with the current, I begin the voyage of my rootless self. In this condition I am quite capable of fulfilling the ordinary demands of life—of finding a wife, of becoming a father, of supporting the household, of entertaining friends, of reading books, of paying taxes, of performing military service, and so on and so forth. In this condition I am capable, if needs be, of killing in cold blood, for the sake of my family or to protect my country, or whatever it may be. I am the ordinary, routine citizen who answers to a name and who is given a number in his passport. I am thoroughly irresponsible for my fate. Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking about me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me, neither my own behavior nor that of my neighbors, nor do I understand why the governments are at war or at peace, whichever the case may be. At such moments I am born anew, born and baptized by my right name: Gottlieb Leberecht Müller! Everything I do in my right name is looked upon as crazy. People make furtive signs behind my back, sometimes to my face even. I am forced to break with friends and family and loved ones. I am obliged to break camp. And so, just as naturally as in dream, I find myself once again drifting with the current, usually walking along a highway, my face set toward the sinking sun. Now all my faculties become alert. I am the most suave, silky, cunning animal—and I am at the same time what might be called a holy man. I know how to fend for myself. I know how to avoid work, how to avoid entangling relationships, how to avoid pity, sympathy, bravery, and all the other pitfalls. I stay in place or with a person just long enough to obtain what I need, and then I’m off again. I have no goal: the aimless wandering is sufficient unto itself. I am free as a bird, sure as an equilibrist. Manna falls from the sky; I have only to hold out my hands and receive. And everywhere I leave the most pleasant feeling behind me, as though, in accepting the gifts that are showered upon me, I am doing a real favor to others. Even my dirty linen is taken care of by loving hands. Because everybody loves a right-living man! Gottlieb! What a beautiful name it is! Gottlieb!

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  It was a wonderful experience to have, but the downside was that it sheltered me from reality. Maryvale was an oasis that kept me from the truth, a comfortable place where I could avoid making a tough decision. But the real world doesn’t go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And at some point, you have to choose. Black or white. Pick a side. You can try to hide from it. You can say, “Oh, I don’t pick sides,” but at some point life will force you to pick a side. At the end of grade six I left Maryvale to go to H. A. Jack Primary, a government school. I had to take an aptitude test before I started, and, based on the results of the test, the school counselor told me, “You’re going to be in the smart classes, the A classes.” I showed up for the first day of school and went to my classroom. Of the thirty or so kids in my class, almost all of them were white. There was one Indian kid, maybe one or two black kids, and me. Then recess came. We went out on the playground, and black kids were everywhere. It was an ocean of black, like someone had opened a tap and all the black had come pouring out. I was like, Where were they all hiding? The white kids I’d met that morning, they went in one direction, the black kids went in another direction, and I was left standing in the middle, totally confused. Were we going to meet up later on? I did not understand what was happening. I was eleven years old, and it was like I was seeing my country for the first time. In the townships you don’t see segregation, because everyone is black. In the white world, any time my mother took me to a white church, we were the only black people there, and my mom didn’t separate herself from anyone. She didn’t care. She’d go right up and sit with the white people. And at Maryvale, the kids were mixed up and hanging out together. Before that day, I had never seen people being together and yet not together, occupying the same space yet choosing not to associate with each other in any way. In an instant I could see, I could feel, how the boundaries were drawn. Groups moved in color patterns across the yard, up the stairs, down the hall. It was insane. I looked over at the white kids I’d met that morning. Ten minutes earlier I’d thought I was at a school where they were a majority. Now I realized how few of them there actually were compared to everyone else.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I still didn’t know why any of this had happened; I’d been running on pure adrenaline. Once we stopped running I realized how much pain I was in. I looked down, and the skin on my arms was scraped and torn. I was cut up and bleeding all over. Mom was, too. My baby brother was fine, though, incredibly. My mom had wrapped herself around him, and he’d come through without a scratch. I turned to her in shock. “What was that?! Why are we running?!” “What do you mean, ‘Why are we running?’ Those men were trying to kill us.” “You never told me that! You just threw me out of the car!” “I did tell you. Why didn’t you jump?” “Jump?! I was asleep!” “So I should have left you there for them to kill you?” “At least they would have woken me up before they killed me.” Back and forth we went. I was too confused and too angry about getting thrown out of the car to realize what had happened. My mother had saved my life. As we caught our breath and waited for the police to come and drive us home, she said, “Well, at least we’re safe, thank God.” But I was nine years old and I knew better. I wasn’t going to keep quiet this time. “No, Mom! This was not thanks to God! You should have listened to God when he told us to stay at home when the car wouldn’t start, because clearly the Devil tricked us into coming out tonight.” “No, Trevor! That’s not how the Devil works. This is part of God’s plan, and if He wanted us here then He had a reason…” And on and on and there we were, back at it, arguing about God’s will. Finally I said, “Look, Mom. I know you love Jesus, but maybe next week you could ask him to meet us at our house. Because this really wasn’t a fun night.” She broke out in a huge smile and started laughing. I started laughing, too, and we stood there, this little boy and his mom, our arms and legs covered in blood and dirt, laughing together through the pain in the light of a petrol station on the side of the road in the middle of the night. [image file=image_rsrc2TA.jpg] Apartheid was perfect racism. It took centuries to develop, starting all the way back in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company landed at the Cape of Good Hope and established a trading colony, Kaapstad, later known as Cape Town, a rest stop for ships traveling between Europe and India. To impose white rule, the Dutch colonists went to war with the natives, ultimately developing a set of laws to subjugate and enslave them. When the British took over the Cape Colony, the descendants of the original Dutch settlers trekked inland and developed their own language, culture, and customs, eventually becoming their own people, the Afrikaners—the white tribe of Africa.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would set the alarm clock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up and about? Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved. Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of the earth, wouldn’t it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and just board an airplane for China? But the body follows after the mind. The simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it gets particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two start going in opposite directions. Laboring with the trowel was bliss: it left the mind completely free and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like old shoelaces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and over-exasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the promised tableland would heave in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that’s holy. These misadventures happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began to approach it. Everybody had at one time or another planted the flag in this territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently. It disappeared overnight—sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. It was No Man’s Land and it stank with the litter of invisible deaths. If a truce were declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But the truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency was the “zone between” idea. Here the bullets flew and the corpses piled up; then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a stench. This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable. What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt: it must be mentioned only in de luxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart. What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  It was a wonderful experience to have, but the downside was that it sheltered me from reality. Maryvale was an oasis that kept me from the truth, a comfortable place where I could avoid making a tough decision. But the real world doesn’t go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And at some point, you have to choose. Black or white. Pick a side. You can try to hide from it. You can say, “Oh, I don’t pick sides,” but at some point life will force you to pick a side. At the end of grade six I left Maryvale to go to H. A. Jack Primary, a government school. I had to take an aptitude test before I started, and, based on the results of the test, the school counselor told me, “You’re going to be in the smart classes, the A classes.” I showed up for the first day of school and went to my classroom. Of the thirty or so kids in my class, almost all of them were white. There was one Indian kid, maybe one or two black kids, and me. Then recess came. We went out on the playground, and black kids were everywhere. It was an ocean of black, like someone had opened a tap and all the black had come pouring out. I was like, Where were they all hiding? The white kids I’d met that morning, they went in one direction, the black kids went in another direction, and I was left standing in the middle, totally confused. Were we going to meet up later on? I did not understand what was happening. I was eleven years old, and it was like I was seeing my country for the first time. In the townships you don’t see segregation, because everyone is black. In the white world, any time my mother took me to a white church, we were the only black people there, and my mom didn’t separate herself from anyone. She didn’t care. She’d go right up and sit with the white people. And at Maryvale, the kids were mixed up and hanging out together. Before that day, I had never seen people being together and yet not together, occupying the same space yet choosing not to associate with each other in any way. In an instant I could see, I could feel, how the boundaries were drawn. Groups moved in color patterns across the yard, up the stairs, down the hall. It was insane. I looked over at the white kids I’d met that morning. Ten minutes earlier I’d thought I was at a school where they were a majority. Now I realized how few of them there actually were compared to everyone else.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Ceaseless questions ran through my mind. Had God been preparing me throughout my life for the mission of setting up the Kingdom of Heaven on earth? Was Sun Myung Moon the Messiah? I prayed earnestly to God for Him to show me a sign. Was the Divine Principle the new truth? What should I do? It didn’t dawn on me in my agitated state of confusion that I had been subjected to mind control31—that whereas one week earlier, I had had no belief in Satan, now I was afraid that he was influencing my thoughts. My parents told me to stay away from the group. They didn’t want me to abandon Judaism. My grandparents were Orthodox Jews and I went to Temple, my mom kept kosher and I had a Bar Mitzvah when I turned thirteen. I was very educated about the Nazis and the Holocaust. I didn’t want to change my religion; I just wanted to do the right thing. If Moon was the Moshiach (Hebrew for Anointed One), I reasoned, then I will be fulfilling my Jewish heritage by following him. Even though my parents opposed the group, I believed that as an independent 19-year-old person, I was capable of making my own decision in this matter. I wanted to do what was right. In doing so, I had been told by members of the group, I could later intervene on my parents’ behalf and save them spiritually. After several earnest days of prayer, I received what I thought was the “sign.” Unable to concentrate on my schoolwork, I was sitting on the edge of my bed. I reached down, picked up an Ouspensky book, and opened it to a paragraph at random, which said that history goes through certain cycles to help human beings evolve to a higher plane. At that moment I believed I had had a spiritual experience. How could I have chanced to open the book to that paragraph? I thought that God was surely signaling me to heed Mr. Miller’s lectures. I felt I had to go back and learn more about this movement. Tying The Knot: Becoming An Insider As soon as I called the center, I was whisked off to another three-day workshop. When I asked a member why I hadn’t been told the truth about the group being religious, he asked, “If you knew in advance, would you have come?” I admitted that I probably wouldn’t have.