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

  After a few years, Josh received “dharma transmission”—a formal endorsement to teach Zen—and was named one of Kennett’s “dharma heirs.” Josh noted, “I could set up my own Zen center if I wanted, but it was also obvious to me that I wasn’t enlightened. Maybe I was a tiny bit enlightened. I was a little bit more than a beginner, but, frankly, at most, I was an advanced beginner. I wasn’t any kind of master. I wasn’t a guru.” After those initial years, Kennett changed. She was suffering from chronic illness, and her friendly manner disappeared. She became authoritarian and self-aggrandizing. As Shasta Abbey grew, so did her grandiosity. Eventually, she demanded absolute loyalty from everyone. No one was permitted to question or challenge her. “I think she was frankly stressed out and didn’t know what to do,” Josh observed. “The way I saw it was that she came to the end of what she knew how to teach. She only had three or four years of experience in Japan and a very limited insight…In her mind, she had to be this fully enlightened Buddha.” Not surprisingly, the group changed as well. It became more institutional, hierarchical, and rigid. Eventually, loyalty became the group’s absolute value. Even the slightest questioning of Kennett would provoke an extreme reaction. Monks would be yelled at, punished or demoted. However, Kennett’s rages were seen as skillful, ego-busting Zen teachings. The only acceptable response was to bow and accept the emotional attack. Josh thought the Buddhist teachings were great, and he still liked some of what Kennett taught. But he was dogged by questions. Why is this place so toxic? Why is Kennett abusive and cruel and cold? If she’s so enlightened, why is she such a bully? Is this genuinely Zen, or is it a complex and confused mess of half-baked Zen, monotheism, occultism, and self-adoration—a very strange personality cult? Eventually, in 1976, Josh knew it was time to leave. At the time, he was president of the organization, the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. There weren’t any prohibitions against leaving, but senior members who had left earlier were invariably vilified as failures and losers, too weak to follow the Soto Zen path. But in Zen there is something called angya, a kind of pilgrimage or walkabout in which longtime practitioners go away for an extended period. Josh told Kennett that, after much personal meditation and reflection, he felt that it was time to do an extended angya. She acquiesced, but she was obviously not happy—and from that day on, she tried to persuade Josh to cancel or delay his trip. But Josh held firm to his decision. A week before his departure, Kennett invited Josh to tea. She said she wanted to give him a “going-away present.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He was so full of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day—I suppose purely to amuse himself—he built a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these donkeys that he would let nobody take possession of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn’t part with it for anything. She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt—which by the way she never referred to at all—as for her cunt, I say, well that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt. It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with. Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labeled fuck. You might diddle and piddle, but you might not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the lookout, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera. You couldn’t really think because your mind was already engaged. The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theater on which the owner has left his opera hat. Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at mealtimes to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal.

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

  All three of Babiki’s older sisters spoke English, and her younger sister Lerato spoke a little. So whenever we hung out with Babiki and her sisters and their friends, a lot of the conversation was in English. The rest of it was going right by me in Pedi or in Sotho, but that’s completely normal in South Africa so it never bothered me; I got enough of the gist of the conversation from everyone’s English to know what was going on. And the way my mind works with language, even when I’m hearing other languages, they get filtered into English as I’m hearing them. My mind stores them in English. When my grandmother and great-grandmother were hysterically praying to God to destroy the demon that had shit on their kitchen floor, all of that transpired in Xhosa, but it’s stored in English. I remember it as English. So whenever I lay in bed at night dreaming about Babiki and the moments we’d spent together, I felt like it had transpired in English because that’s how I remembered it. And Tom had never said anything about what language she spoke or didn’t speak, because why would he care? He just wanted to get his free CDs and get with the sister. Which is how I’d been dating a girl for over a month—the girl I very much believed was my first girlfriend—without ever having had a single conversation with her. Now the whole night came rushing back and I saw it from her point of view, and it was perfectly obvious to me why she didn’t want to get out of the car. She probably hadn’t wanted to go to the dance with me in the first place; she probably owed Tom a favor, and Tom can talk anyone into anything. Then I’d left her sitting and waiting for me for an hour and she was pissed off. Then she got into the car and it was the first time we had ever been alone, and she realized I couldn’t even hold a conversation with her. I’d driven her around and gotten lost in the dark—a young girl alone in a car in the middle of nowhere with some strange guy, no idea where I was taking her. She was probably terrified. Then we got to the dance and she didn’t speak anyone’s language. She didn’t know anyone. She didn’t even know me. Bongani and I stood outside the car, staring at each other. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking to her in every language I knew. Nothing worked. She only spoke Pedi. I got so desperate that I started trying to talk to her using hand signals. “Please. You. Me. Inside. Dance. Yes?” “No.” “Inside. Dance. Please?” “No.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit about being interesting and mysterious. I wanted him to love me.” For a second, he looked as though she had said something truly strange. Then his face smoothed over with fatherly tenderness. He stroked her cheek. “You really are a classic,” he said. “You don’t look it, but you are.” Three weeks after she’d started seeing Bernard, a month after she’d left Christine’s, an unexpected thing happened. Someone from a magazine she had interviewed with when she had come to New York three years before called her about a position as an editorial assistant. They had found her résumé and clips from the Evanston college paper in an old file and wanted to know if she was available. It was an architectural journal—not a subject she cared much about, but she remembered the magazine as being well written and beautifully designed. Besides, she was becoming desperate for a job, so she had the interview and was hired two days later. Babette and Sandra seemed to think that it was the most wonderful thing in the world. (Now Sandra no longer had to stretch Stephanie’s connection with the Voice, and could introduce her as “in editorial.”) Stephanie wasn’t sure that it would in fact be a lot better than working at Christine’s; she no longer cared about being a “young professional” for Jackson’s sake. Meanwhile, her odd relationship with Bernard was beginning to trouble her. Their conversation, although they spoke of many things, seemed mostly polite and for the benefit of fantasies they had about each other. Sexually, they seemed to be on the same level. She couldn’t tell if this was disappointing to him or not. And the money issue was beginning to disturb her again, now that she was working for the magazine. He’s not someone who comes to my house and is nice to me, she thought as she lay alone in bed. He’s someone who pays me to fuck him. She had an image of herself, sprawled half on and half off a bed at Christine’s, her upside-down head patiently looking back at her from the mirror as some galoot humped her. This vision blended discordantly with the idea of herself at her desk at the magazine and she was unable to separate them. Despite this ambiguity, she was curiously reluctant to drop the affair. He only saw her once or twice a week, he was not demanding, he liked her favorite authors and was somehow very reassuring. Reassuring of what, she didn’t know, but it was connected to her old feeling that he thought of her as a representative of the exciting avant-garde—although it also seemed that if he had any brains at all, he would’ve realized by now that she was just a bewildered human. “I think I know why you go to places like Christine’s,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Had I been a dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn’t have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or lent me money, as they frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn’t know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues I was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about. Ordinary men are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be. But a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically nonexistent. Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his existence was a mystery, to himself and to everyone else. I couldn’t afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way—the mystery was too intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long enough and hard enough and the spark will come! The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practiced by certain low forms of life, the marvelous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystic’s union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is “life” to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round.

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

  Each component has a powerful effect on the other two: change one, and the others will tend to follow. Succeed in changing all three, and the individual will be swept away. However, from my experience in researching destructive cults, I have added one more component that is vital: control of information. If you control the information someone receives, you restrict his ability to think for himself. These four components of mind control serve as the basic reference points for understanding how mind control works. Cognitive dissonance theory is not as forbidding as its name might sound. In 1950, Festinger summarized its basic principle this way: “If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance.”84 What did Festinger mean by “dissonance?” In basic terms, he was referring to the conflict that occurs when a thought, a feeling or a behavior is altered in contradiction to the other two. A person can tolerate only a certain amount of discrepancy between his thoughts, feelings and actions, which after all make up the different components of his identity. Festinger’s theory states—and a great deal of later research has confirmed—that if any one of the three components changes, the other two will shift to reduce the dissonance. How does this kind of shift apply to the behavior of people in cults? Festinger looked for a place to examine his ideas in the real world. In 1956 he published a book, When Prophecy Fails, about a Wisconsin flying saucer cult, whose leader had predicted the end of the world. The cult leader claimed to be in mental contact with aliens from another planet. Followers sold their homes, gave away their money, and stood at the appointed date on a mountainside, waiting all night to be picked up by flying saucers before a flood destroyed the world the next morning. When morning came with no saucers and no flood—just a spate of satirical news stories about the group—the followers might have been expected to become disillusioned and angry. And a few did—but they were fringe members who had not invested much time or energy. Most members, however, became more convinced than ever. Their leader proclaimed that the aliens had witnessed their faithful vigil and decided to spare the Earth. Members wound up feeling more committed to the leader, even after they took a dramatic public stance that resulted in public humiliation. Most Jehovah’s Witnesses responded to the failure of the group’s many prophecies of the end of the world with renewed faith. Cognitive dissonance theory helps explain why this heightened commitment occurred. According to Festinger, people need to maintain order and meaning in their life. They need to think they are acting according to their self-image and their own values. If their behavior changes for any reason, their self-image and values change to match. The important thing to recognize about cult groups is that they deliberately create dissonance in people this way and exploit it to control them.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  They got to the place where the march was to begin and he saw the cub scouts and the girl scouts, the marching bands, the fathers in their Legion caps and uniforms, the mothers from the Legion’s auxilliary, the pretty drum majorettes. The street was a sea of red, white, and blue. He remembered how he and all the rest of the kids on the block had put on their cub scout uniforms and marched every Memorial Day down these same streets. He remembered the hundreds of people lining the sidewalks, everyone standing and cheering and waving their small flags, his mother standing with the other mothers on the block shouting for him to keep in step. “There’s my Yankee Doodle boy!” he’d hear her shouting, and he’d feel embarrassed, pulling his cap over his eyes like he always did. There were scouts decorating the Cadillac now with red, white, and blue crepe paper and long paper banners that read WELCOME HOME RON KOVIC AND EDDIE DUGAN and SUPPORT OUR BOYS IN VIETNAM. There was a small sign, too, that read: OUR WOUNDED VIETNAM VETS . . . EDDIE DUGAN AND RON KOVIC. When the scouts were finished, the commander came running over to the car with a can of beer in his hand. “Let’s go!” he shouted, jumping back in with the heavy guy. They drove slowly through the crowd until they were all the way up in the front of the parade. He could hear the horns and drums behind him and he looked out and watched the pretty drum majorettes and clowns dancing in the street. He looked out onto the sidewalks where the people from his town had gathered just like when he was a kid. But it was different. He couldn’t tell at first exactly what it was, but something was not the same, they weren’t waving and they just seemed to be standing staring at Eddie Dugan and himself like they weren’t even there. It was as if they were ghosts like little Johnny Heanon or Billy Morris come back from the dead. And he couldn’t understand what was happening. Maybe, he thought, the banners, the ones the boy scouts and their fathers had put up, the ones telling the whole town who Eddie Dugan and he were, maybe, he thought, they had dropped off into the street and no one knew who they were and that’s why no one was waving. If the signs had been there, they’d have been flooding into the streets, stomping their feet and screaming and cheering the way they did for him and Eddie at the Little League games. They’d have been swelling into the streets, trying to shake their hands just like in the movies, when the boys had come

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

  Opinion has been divided about the judgment of the author who included a copy of this law in his comparison of Mosaic and Roman jurisprudence. Was the spirit of the Theodosian constitution, indeed, akin to religious injunctions against same-sex love, or was the compiler overreaching in his effort to bend the law into a point of contact between the “spirit of Moses” and the Roman state? In other words, was the Theodosian measure inspired by religious homophobia, or by the immemorial ideals of Roman manhood? On the one hand, the attack came at a moment pregnant with change, as Theodosius I was transforming the Roman state into a Christian one, and the official conflagration of a whole class of sexual outcasts was uncharacteristic of Roman jurisprudence. On the other hand, the language of the law could not possibly be more emphatic about its roots in Roman tradition, and it would be a dodge to explain this rhetoric as a cloak for a clandestine Christian agenda. The official who actually drafted the language of the law was, in fact, one of the most visible pagans around the court. But most tellingly, the object of regulation was sexual passivity, and in the form of public prostitution. The categories of regulation are fundamentally, undeniably Roman.10 The chemistry of the Theodosian measure was complex, and it simply cannot be broken down into discrete proportions of the constituent elements, classical masculinity and unfamiliar malevolence. The law raises the most profound questions about the passage from an ancient legal and cultural regime, whose protocols required men to play the dominant role in sexual encounters, to a legal and cultural regime that treated the gender of the participants as the primary fact of any sexual conjunction. The gradual transition from a classical to a Christian regulatory system produced many complex harmonies along the way, of which the law of 390 is a signal example. It can only be explained by considering the maturation of Christian attitudes toward same-sex eros. In late antiquity Christian opposition to same-sex love developed far beyond the brief, violent injunctions of the scriptural tradition that ascribed the habits of same-sex eroticism to the fallen confusion of polytheistic cultures. The eradication of sexual sin became the object of a nascent penitential discipline; simultaneously, same-sex love became pathologized to an unprecedented degree, spoken of as a disease that threatened to contaminate the body politic. Indeed, a new concern for the sexual behavior of the populace as such grows up in the fourth century. At the same time, the process of legal change cannot be understood apart from the specific mechanisms and traditions of regulation in Roman law, the place of prostitution in the public order, and the subtle institutional shifts in late antiquity that enabled more aggressive attempts at the legal control of sexual morality. In short, a host of much broader changes within Christianity and within the state converged to ignite the awful blaze of 390.11

• 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.