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 Cancer (1934)

  More like a freight station, with bills of lading and rubber stamps everywhere, and pasty-faced clerks scribbling away with broken pens in huge, cumbersome ledgers. My dole of coal and wood portioned out, off we marched, the hunchback and I, with a wheelbarrow, toward the dormitory. I was to have a room on the top floor, in the same wing as the pions. The situation was taking on a humorous aspect. I didn’t know what the hell to expect next. Perhaps a spittoon. The whole thing smacked very much of preparation for a campaign; the only things missing were a knapsack and rifle— and a brass slug. The room assigned me was rather large, with a small stove to which was attached a crooked pipe that made an elbow just over the iron cot. A big chest for the coal and wood stood near the door. The windows gave out on a row of forlorn little houses all made of stone in which lived the grocer, the baker, the shoemaker, the butcher, etc.—all imbecilic-looking clodhoppers. I glanced over the rooftops toward the bare hills where a train was clattering. The whistle of the locomotive screamed mournfully and hysterically. After the hunchback had made the fire for me I inquired about the grub. It was not quite time for dinner. I flopped on the bed, with my overcoat on, and pulled the covers over me. Beside me was the eternal rickety night table in which the piss pot is hidden away. I stood the alarm on the table and watched the minutes ticking off. Into the well of the room a bluish light filtered in from the street. I listened to the trucks rattling by as I gazed vacantly at the stove pipe, at the elbow where it was held together with bits of wire. The coal chest intrigued me. Never in my life had I occupied a room with a coal chest. And never in my life had I built a fire or taught children. Nor, for that matter, never in my life had I worked without pay. I felt free and chained at the same time—like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man. I felt like a hired man, like a jack-of-all- trades, like a hunter, like a rover, like a galley slave, like a pedagogue, like a worm and a louse. I was free, but my limbs were shackled. A democratic soul with a free meal ticket, but no power of locomotion, no voice. I felt like a jellyfish nailed to a plank. Above all, I felt hungry. The hands were moving slowly. Still ten more minutes to kill before the fire alarm would go off. The shadows in the room deepened.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

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

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Each member of the group had an assigned partner and was told never to be alone. These measures were taken “to keep [members] in the mindset.” Communication was often limited to simply saying “Yes,” “No,” or “I don’t know.”572 “Emotional Control” Conway and Siegelman succinctly explain in their first book, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change , how the mind can be stymied, sidetracked, and potentially subjugated by what it sees as “information disease.” In their second book, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics, and Our Private Lives , they discuss the interlocking emotional control that controlling groups and leaders often use. Conway and Siegelman write, “Because as human beings, beyond all differences of faith and culture, our feelings are our most important resource, our most complex and fully integrated and universal communication capacity. They may also be our most accurate monitor of personal morality—of what is right and wrong for each of us as individuals—and of the fairness of our conduct in relation to one another. When at that intimate level the wisdom of our feelings is stilled, distorted or thrown into confusion, our greatest strength may quickly be turned into our greatest vulnerability.”573 The authors explain that such emotional control is achieved through “the reduction of individual response to basic emotions such as love, guilt, fear, anger, hatred, etc.” This is accomplished by “means of suggestion” through “the indirect use of cues, code words, symbols, images and myths.” For example, Bible-based groups may use the images of Jesus and Satan to emotionally manipulate members. In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism , Robert Jay Lifton correlates the use of such imagery to the category of “ultimate terms” or “God terms” and “devil terms.”574 This means of manipulation allows its practitioners to assign any action or feeling they perceive as negative or challenging to their authority in the category of “satanic” or “demonic” while simultaneously using the image of Jesus or God as a facade for their own authority. Within this box, whenever disobedience occurs or doubts surface, they are consigned to the devil or dark forces. Obedience to the leadership is correspondingly characterized as compliance to the will of God and heavenly authority. In the family cult Marcus Wesson led, his children were taught that he was “God’s messenger” and that the “end times” were “close at hand.” One son said, “He was God. That’s just the way it was.”575 Within the confines of this construct to obey Wesson was to obey God. Disobedience was, therefore, defiance of God. Those who opposed Wesson, such as the authorities, were characterized as “Satan.”576 Caught within this world of polarized imagery, one of Wesson’s daughters said she felt “trapped.” But religious imagery isn’t the only way such ultimate terms can be used. Secular symbols can easily be used, such as the popular principles and corresponding icons of business, art, philosophy, nationalism, political theory, psychology, philosophy, or virtually any field of interest.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  MOVE’s interaction with the outside world slipped away until its members became largely socially isolated, and they were “limited to the physical space of a 15-foot wide Philadelphia row house.”253 This little row house became the equivalent of a compound. Neighbors complained to authorities about MOVE, who used bullhorns to preach the group’s political message and reportedly lived in “unsanitary” conditions.254 Some MOVE members were criminals wanted for crimes ranging from parole violations and possession of illegal firearms to terrorist threats.255 MOVE behaved in a way that would historically repeat itself as the essential root cause of “cult standoffs” with authorities. That is, Africa and his followers largely refused to acknowledge the authority of virtually anyone other than their leader and saw law enforcement as an unwarranted intrusion. When warrants were served on MOVE members in 1985, the group opened fire on police officers. In response to the group’s resistance and intransigence, a police helicopter dropped a “percussion” or “concussion” bomb on the house, which the mayor of Philadelphia referred to as a “stun device,”256 hoping to end the standoff. The explosion started a fire, which destroyed sixty-one houses. Within the MOVE row house, five children and six adults were found dead.257 The city of Philadelphia spent $42 million in the aftermath of the MOVE tragedy through settlements, investigation, and rebuilding efforts.258 MOVE continues to be a controversial group in Philadelphia. In 2002 a former member, thirty-four-year-old John Gilbride, was found dead in his car. Gilbride had been locked in a contentious custody battle with John Africa’s widow, Alberta Wicker Africa. Two weeks before his death, a court had granted Gilbride time with his son. But just hours before the unsupervised visit would have taken place, Gilbride was found dead. The murder remains unsolved.259 1989—Jeffrey Lundgren Murders In the spring of 1989, cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren murdered Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their three teenage daughters. But their bodies weren’t found until January 1990 when they were discovered buried in a barn. Lundgren recruited his followers primarily from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an offshoot of Mormonism. The cult leader had once been a tour guide at the denomination’s historic, original temple. Lundgren claimed that God wanted him to lead a revolution in Kirtland, a small town twenty miles from Cleveland, Ohio. Like Charles Manson, Jeffrey Lundgren convinced his followers that they were fulfilling a special and chosen role in human history. God’s plan was for the group to seize the historic temple in Kirtland. Eventually Lundgren changed the plan and said the Avery family must be murdered to satisfy God as a sacrifice. After the killings Lundgren’s followers seemed mystified by their cult experience. “We were supposed to help the hungry. We were supposed to help the poor. Of course, none of that happened. I still don’t know what happened…something went terribly wrong,” said former cult member Susan Luff.260 At times Lundgren demanded money from his followers at gunpoint.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  eM a ae eles Par ad ‘ Fe: ae ; ast ie “y F Se 7 “eM I thought I could make out a stone quarry in a rather lighter patch on the steep slope of the mountain over to the right, and I seemed to see a railway track in the regular curve of the lines below it. But my mind dwelt chiefly on the fenced square in the middle and the tent-like building at the far end, with a cloud of white smoke above it. Whatever may have been going on inside me at the time, the children of Israel’s camp in the wilderness was closer to me than life in Bala, which I found more incomprehensible every day, or at least, said Austerlitz, that is how it strikes me now. That evening in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel Austerlitz also told me that there was no wireless set or newspaper in the manse in Bala. I don’t know that Elias and his wife, Gwendolyn, ever mentioned the fighting on the continent of Europe, he said. I couldn’t imagine any world outside Wales. Only after the end of the war did this state of affairs begin to change. A new epoch seemed to dawn with the victory celebrations, when even in Bala there was dancing in the streets, which were decked with brightly colored bunting. For me, it began when I first broke the ban on going to the cinema, and after that I used to watch the newsreel from the cubbyhole occupied by the film projectionist Owen, one of the three sons of the visionary Evan. Around the same time Gwendolyn’s state of health deteriorated, almost imperceptibly at first but then with increasing speed. She, who had always kept everything in the most painfully neat order, began to neglect first the house and then herself. She simply stood in the kitchen, looking helpless, and when Elias prepared a meal as best he could she would eat almost nothing.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The gossip had reached the minister, Jamie’s white-haired and gentle old father. He had looked at the girl with bewildered eyes—he had always been bewildered by his daughter. A poor housewife she was, and very untidy; if she cooked she mucked up the pots and the kitchen, and her hands were strangely unskilled with the needle; this he knew, since his heels suffered much from her darning. Remembering her mother he had shaken his head and sighed many times as he looked at Jamie. For her mother had been a soft, timorous woman, and he himself was very retiring, but their Jamie loved striding over the hills in the teeth of a gale, an uncouth, boyish creature. As a child she had gone rabbit stalking with ferrets; had ridden a neighbour’s farmhorse astride on a sack, without stirrup, saddle or bridle; had done all manner of outlandish things. And he, poor lonely, bewildered man, still mourning his wife, had been no match for her. Yet even as a child she had sat at the piano and picked out little tunes of her own inventing. He had done his best; she had been taught to play by Miss Morrison of the next-door village, since music alone seemed able to tame her. And as Jamie had grown so her tunes had grown with her, gathering purpose and strength with her body. She would improvise for hours on the winter evenings, if Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen. He had always made Barbara welcome at the manse; they had been so inseparable, those two, since childhood—and now? He had frowned, remembering the gossip. Rather timidly he had spoken to Jamie. ‘Listen, my dear, when you’re always together, the lads don’t get a chance to come courting, and Barbara’s grandmother wants the lass married. Let her walk with a lad on Sabbath afternoons—there’s that young MacGregor, he’s a fine, steady fellow, and they say he’s in love with the little lass. . . .’ Jamie had stared at him, scowling darkly. ‘She doesn’t want to walk out with MacGregor!’ The minister had shaken his head yet again. In the hands of his child he was utterly helpless. Then Jamie had gone to Inverness in order the better to study music, but every week-end she had spent at the manse, there had been no real break in her friendship with Barbara; indeed they had seemed more devoted than ever, no doubt because of these forced separations. Two years later the minister had suddenly died, leaving his little all to Jamie. She had had to turn out of the old, grey manse, and had taken a room in the village near Barbara. But antagonism, no longer restrained through respect for the gentle and child-like pastor, had made itself very acutely felt—hostile they had been, those good people, to Jamie.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Jesus was the one person who gave access to reality and access to God. That is the key thought of this letter. The Riddle of the New Testament So much is clear; but, when we turn to the other questions of introduction, Hebrews is wrapped in mystery. The New Testament scholar E. F. Scott wrote: ‘The Epistle to the Hebrews is in many respects the riddle of the New Testament.’ When it was written, to whom it was written, and who wrote it are questions at which we can only guess. The very history of the letter shows how its mystery is to be treated with a certain reserve and suspicion. It was a long time before it became an unquestioned New Testament book. The first list of New Testament books, the Muratorian Canon, compiled about AD 170, does not mention it at all. The great Alexandrian scholars of the second and third centuries, Clement and Origen, knew it and loved it but agreed that its place as Scripture was disputed. Of the great African fathers of the same period, Cyprian never mentions it and Tertullian knows that its place was disputed. Eusebius, the early church historian, says that it ranked among the disputed books. It was not until the time of Athanasius, in the middle of the fourth century, that Hebrews was definitely accepted as a New Testament book, and even the founder of the Reformation, Martin Luther, was not too sure about it. It is strange to think how long this great book had to wait for full recognition. When was it Written? The only information we have comes from the letter itself. Clearly, it is written for what we might call second-generation Christians (2:3). The story was transmitted to its recipients by those who had heard the Lord. The members of the community to whom it was written were not new to the Christian faith; they ought to have been mature (5:12). They must have had a long history, for they are called to look back on the former days (10:32). They had a great history behind them and heroic martyr figures on which they ought to look back for inspiration (13:7). The thing that will help us most in dating the letter is its references to persecution. It is clear that at one time their leaders had died for their faith (13:7). It is clear that they themselves had not yet suffered persecution, for they had not yet resisted to the point of shedding their blood (12:4). It is also clear that they have had ill-treatment to suffer, for they have had to undergo the looting of their goods (10:32– 4). And it is clear from the outlook of the letter that there is a risk of persecution about to come. From all that, it is safe to say that this letter must have been written between two persecutions, in days when Christians were not actually persecuted but were nonetheless unpopular.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  A bigger house had been set on our roof and was imperceptibly pushing us into the ground. Momma asked, in her nice-folks voice, “What who said, Brother Taylor?” She knew the answer. We all knew the answer. “Florida.” His little wrinkled hands were making fists, then straightening, then making fists again. “She said it just last night.” Bailey and I looked at each other and I hunched my chair closer to him. “Said ‘I want some children.’” When he pitched his already high voice to what he considered a feminine level, or at any rate to his wife's, Miz Florida's, level, it streaked across the room, zigzagging like lightning. Uncle Willie had stopped eating and was regarding him with something like pity. “Maybe you was dreaming, Brother Taylor. Could have been a dream.”

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I pulled my mind apart. Who? Who was Tommy Valdon? Finally a face dragged itself from my memory. He was the nice-looking brown-skinned boy who lived across the pond. As soon as I had pinned him down, I began to wonder, Why? Why me? Was it a joke? But if Tommy was the boy I remembered he was a very sober person and a good student. Well, then, it wasn't a joke. All right, what evil dirty things did he have in mind? My questions fell over themselves, an army in retreat. Haste, dig for cover. Protect your flanks. Don't let the enemy close the gap between you. What did a Valentine do, anyway? Starting to throw the paper in the foul-smelling hole, I thought of Louise. I could show it to her. I folded the paper back in the original creases, and went back to class. There was no time during the lunch period since I had to run to the Store and wait on customers. The note was in my sock and every time Momma looked at me, I feared that her church gaze might have turned into X-ray vision and she could not only see the note and read its message but would interpret it as well. I felt myself slipping down a sheer cliff of guilt, and a second time I nearly destroyed the note but there was no opportunity. The take-up bell rang and Bailey raced me to school, so the note was forgotten. But serious business is serious, and it had to be attended to. After classes I waited for Louise. She was talking to a group of girls, laughing. But when I gave her our signal (two waves of the left hand) she said good-bye to them and joined me in the road. I didn't give her the chance to ask what was on my mind (her favorite question); I simply gave her the note. Recognizing the fold she stopped smiling. We were in deep waters. She opened the letter and read it aloud twice. “Well, what do you think?” I said, “What do I think? That's what I'm asking you? What is there to think?” “Looks like he wants you to be his valentine.” “Louise, I can read. But what does it mean?” “Oh, you know. His valentine. His love.” There was that hateful word again. That treacherous word that yawned up at you like a volcano. “Well, I won't. Most decidedly I won't. Not ever again.” “Have you been his valentine before? What do you mean never again?” I couldn't lie to my friend and I wasn't about to freshen old ghosts. “Well, don't answer him then, and that's the end of it.” I was a little relieved that she thought it could be gotten rid of so quickly. I tore the note in half and gave her a part. Walking down the hill we minced the paper in a thousand shreds and gave it to the wind.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  A major reason the act of gendering remains invisible to most people is that, in the vast majority of cases, our assessment of a person’s gender tends to be in agreement with that person’s gender identity and the gender assignments made by other people. (If the genders we assigned to individuals regularly differed from the assignments made by other people, the guesswork inherent in gendering would become far more obvious to us.) However, as a transsexual, I have been in numerous situations (particularly during my transition) where two or more people simultaneously came to different conclusions regarding my perceived gender—that is, one person assumed that I was female, while another assumed that I was male. Such instances demonstrate the speculative nature of gendering. I have also found that people’s experiences and preconceptions around gender dramatically affect the way they gender other people. For example, back when I identified as a male crossdresser, I found that I could “pass” as a woman rather easily in suburban areas, but in cities (where people were presumably more aware of the existence of gender-variant people) I would often be “read” as a crossdressed male. Most cissexuals remain oblivious to the subjective nature of gendering, primarily because they themselves have not regularly had the experience of being misgendered—i.e., mistakenly assigned a gender that does not match one’s identified gender. Unfortunately, this lack of experience usually leads cissexuals to mistakenly believe that the process of gendering is a matter of pure observation, rather than the act of speculation it is. Cissexual Assumption The second process that enables cissexual privilege is cissexual assumption. This occurs when a cissexual makes the common, albeit mistaken, assumption that the way they experience their physical and subconscious sexes (i.e., the fact that they do not feel uncomfortable with the sex they were born into, nor do they think of themselves as or wish they could become the other sex) applies to everyone else in the world. In other words, the cissexual indiscriminately projects their cissexuality onto all other people, thus transforming cissexuality into a human attribute that is taken for granted. There is an obvious analogy to heterosexual assumption here: Most cissexuals assume that everyone they meet is also cissexual, just as most heterosexuals assume that everyone they meet is also heterosexual (unless, of course, they are provided with evidence to the contrary).

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Personally, I have always found the term “gender identity” to be rather misleading. After all, identifying as something, whether it be as a woman, a Democrat, a Christian, a feminist, a cat person, or a metalhead, seems to be a conscious, deliberate choice on our part, one that we make in order to better describe how we think we fit into the world. Thus, with regard to transsexuals, the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex. The main reason I make this distinction between gender identity and subconscious sex is that it best explains my own personal experiences. I did not have the quintessential trans experience of always feeling that I should have been female. For me, this recognition came about more gradually. The first memories I have of being trans took place early in my elementary school years, when I was around five or six. By this time, I was already consciously aware of the fact that I was physically male and that other people thought of me as a boy. During this time, I experienced numerous manifestations of my female subconscious sex: I had dreams in which adults would tell me I was a girl; I would draw pictures of little boys with needles going into their penises, imagining that the medicine in the syringe would make that organ disappear; I had an unexplainable feeling that I was doing something wrong every time I walked into the boys’ restroom at school; and whenever our class split into groups of boys and girls, I always had a sneaking suspicion that at any moment someone might tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, what are you doing here? You’re not a boy.” I wasn’t sure what to make of these feelings at the time. After all, I was obviously a boy—everybody thought so. And unlike other MTF spectrum children, I never really wanted to take part in girlish activities, such as playing house. Being that, like most elementary school children, my understanding of “girl” and “boy” was largely based on gender preferences in toys, activities, and interests, it wasn’t clear to me how to reconcile my vague, subconscious feelings with my passion for dinosaurs and my desire to be a major league baseball player when I grew up.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Without that—if someone were to suggest, for instance, that this “Christ” of whom Paul speaks never lived at all or never died on a cross—Paul’s whole “gospel” makes no sense. That, indeed, is what some people in the second century tried to say, offering instead a “Jesus” who was simply a teacher of spirituality. But is that all? Is “the gospel in the gospels” simply a matter of the bare fact of Jesus’s death, which Paul and others would then interpret as “good news” even though nobody saw it like that at the time? That, I think, is the problem to which I, in my invited address at Cambridge, was supposed to offer an answer. Sadly, once more, I can’t remember anything about what I said. Perhaps it’s still in a file somewhere, but to be honest I haven’t looked. There may even, for all I know, be a tape recording— though cassette tapes (remember them?) were still in their infancy in 1978, the year I gave the address. I might, though, hazard a guess at some of what I said. There are of course the famous passages, such as Mark 10:45: “The son of man...came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many.’” Ah, think readers, there we have it: a reference to Daniel 7, coupled with a reference to Isaiah 53:5, the famous passage in which the “servant of the LORD” is wounded, bruised, and killed “for our transgressions” and “for our iniquities.” That sounds—to some! —as though Mark had after all been taking lessons from Paul. That’s enough—there is our “atonement theology” in a nutshell, right there in Mark. There is a problem, though. Matthew has the same line (20:28), but when Luke has an opportunity to reproduce it, he appears to leave out the crucial element (22:27, where Jesus simply says, “I am with you here like a servant”). Some have even claimed, because of this and other features, that Luke has no “theology of the cross,” no doctrine of “atonement,” at all. I regard that as a grievous misunderstanding; I will explain why later. But, even if Luke had reproduced Mark’s phrase exactly, it doesn’t look as though the gospels really make “atonement,” in the sense the church has come to use that word, their main theme. When it comes to “justification,” there is one passage in Luke, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (18:9–14), in which the sinner is said to be “justified” in something like a Pauline sense. After all, he confessed his sins and trusted solely in God’s mercy, unlike the self-righteous Pharisee. And there are several sayings in John’s gospel, not usually discussed when people talk about “justification,” that might be regarded as relevant to the topic.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  35 The Well of Loneliness was my introduction to lesbianism and what I thought of as pornography. For months the book was both a treat and a threat. It allowed me to see a little of the mysterious world of the pervert. It stimulated my libido and I told myself that it was educational because it informed me of the difficulties in the secret world of the pervert. I was certain that I didn't know any perverts. Of course I ruled out the jolly sissies who sometimes stayed at our house and cooked whopping eight-course dinners while the perspiration made paths down their made-up faces. Since everyone accepted them, and more particularly since they accepted themselves, I knew that their laughter was real and that their lives were cheerful comedies, interrupted only by costume changes and freshening of make-up. But true freaks, the “women lovers,” captured yet strained my imagination. They were, according to the book, disowned by their families, snubbed by their friends and ostracized from every society. This bitter punishment was inflicted upon them because of a physical condition over which they had no control. After my third reading of The Well of Loneliness I became a bleeding heart for the downtrodden misunderstood lesbians. I thought “lesbian” was synonymous with hermaphrodite, and when I wasn't actively aching over their pitiful state, I was wondering how they managed simpler body functions. Did they have a choice of organs to use, and if so, did they alternate or play favorite? Or I tried to imagine how two hermaphrodites made love, and the more I pondered the more confused I became. It seemed that having two of everything other people had, and four where ordinary people just had two, would complicate matters to the point of giving up the idea of making love at all. It was during this reflective time that I noticed how heavy my own voice had become. It droned and drummed two or three whole tones lower than my schoolmates' voices. My hands and feet were also far from being feminine and dainty. In front of the mirror I detachedly examined my body. For a sixteen- year-old my breasts were sadly undeveloped. They could only be called skin swellings, even by the kindest critic. The line from my rib cage to my knees fell straight without even a ridge to disturb its direction. Younger girls than I boasted of having to shave under their arms, but my armpits were as smooth as my face. There was also a mysterious growth developing on my body that defied explanation. It looked totally useless. Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave information on the finished lesbian—and that woefully sketchy—but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  I want, for the moment, to concentrate on one enormously influential strand of twentieth-century scholarship that both reflects the problem I am outlining and then solidifies it in the imagination and implicit understanding of the Western church at least. The German Lutheran scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential New Testament scholars. For Bultmann and the generations of scholars and students who have been influenced directly or indirectly by his work, the story of Jesus himself formed no part of “New Testament theology”—it was merely the presupposition for such a thing. All that was needed was the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion; that was enough. Everything else one needed to know was contained not in his teaching or public career, but in the early church’s reflection on the meaning of the cross. Bultmann therefore read the gospels not as the story of why Jesus lived, not in order to find “the gospel in the gospels” in the way I have described, but in order to observe the early Christians expressing their faith by telling and retelling stories that appear to us to be “Jesus stories,” but that were, for the most part, “mythological” expressions of early Christian experience projected back onto the fictive screen of the history of Jesus. Bultmann’s whole project of form criticism, at least in the way he practiced it, was predicated on the assumption that if you could discover the “forms,” the characteristic shapes of the small anecdotes that make up much of the gospel material, you could thereby observe, as through a lens, the early church expressing its own faith. That, it was believed, was why the early gospel traditions were passed on: not to remember or celebrate something that had happened in the past (i.e., in Jesus’s public career), but to celebrate and sustain the continuing life of faith of the early community. Within the Bultmannian tradition—and, again, this has been very influential—it has often been assumed that the evangelists wrote from the same largely nonhistorical perspective. At least, it has often been assumed that Mark and John wrote not to tell their readers about what actually happened, but to express their own and their communities’ faith and experience. Luke, however, is sometimes accused of falsifying this “gospel,” since he at least clearly does believe that “what happened” matters and has significance in and of itself. Matthew, for his part, has often been seen as a “Jewish Christian” writer (though all the New Testament authors were “Jewish Christians”!) who likewise seems to have slipped up in terms of the “gospel” that one had been taught to expect (no doubt from a particular reading of Paul).

• From The Pisces (2018)

  —When group ended I stayed back a minute to talk to Dr. Jude. “Lucy,” she said, blowing the dust off a book called Low Self-Esteem and Addiction: The Siamese Twins. “It’s good to see you back. I’m sorry you are suffering.” “Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose. She offered me a tissue. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Sure.” “When you said that you were content without anyone—that a person could be content without anyone—did you mean it?” “Oh, Lucy,” she said. “Because I just feel like that’s a lie. I think everyone is looking for someone. And I think that if they aren’t, they’re just pretending.” “That isn’t necessarily true,” she said. “Me, I’m just happy to be alive. Do you really want to know what I think? Well, let me tell you something that you don’t know about me. I’m a breast cancer survivor.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s okay,” she said. “I had stage-three breast cancer when I was only forty-nine. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. In fact, I didn’t think I would. But after a number of very grueling years of chemo and radiation, as well as a double mastectomy, I was declared cancer-free. And I’m still in remission.” “That’s great.” “It is,” she said. “But after the cancer, going through that horrible experience, I took a good look at my life. I thought about what I wanted the next years of my life to look like, however many I had left. And one thing I realized was that I no longer wanted to be with my husband. It was a very hard thing to come to terms with. I have no children. My family lives on the East Coast. He was my family and had seen me through the whole ordeal. He still loved me very much. But I was no longer in love with him. And I realized then that I would rather be by myself, even if it meant never finding anyone again, even with my body looking the way it did postsurgery, than spend the rest of my life with someone I didn’t love.” “How did you know you weren’t in love with him anymore?” I asked. “I just knew,” she said. “Over time I realized.” “I get so confused,” I said. “There were moments when I felt like I was no longer in love with Jamie at all. But after we broke up I wanted him back more than anything. So maybe it was the lust that had faded.” “Lust is lust,” she said. “Any woman can have sex. It’s not hard to find a man to sleep with you.” This was true. I’d never thought of it like that before. With Garrett and Adam, and even Theo, I’d felt like it was a sign that I was special when they’d wanted to have sex with me.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  They believed this, of course, because of Jesus’s resurrection—just as it was disbelief in the bodily resurrection that made scholars from Reimarus to Bultmann and beyond assume that there must still be some great coming event to which the evangelists were referring. Such scholars have normally supposed this great coming event to be the Parousia. The word parousia is a Greek term meaning “royal presence” or “divine appearing,” or perhaps both. It has become the regular technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to Jesus’s “second coming” and its supposed attendant phenomena, which, they maintain, the early church believed to be “imminent.” Early Christians thought, say these scholars, that the Parousia would be the final kingdom-bringing moment. That scholarly mistake has fused with the dispensationalism of popular (mostly American) subculture and speculation to give the present state of confusion about the “end-times” that is so prominent a feature of today’s American church life. The four gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom’s arrival—that is, the claim that God was already king of the world and had become so in a dramatic new way through the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus—was highly paradoxical in their own context, as indeed it has remained so to our day. Then, as now, a claim about God’s kingdom being already present was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder: “Of course God’s kingdom hasn’t arrived—just look out the window!” The problem was more acute for them, facing hostility and often persecution. However, they were in no danger of having what today we might call an overrealized eschatology, imagining (as some today have suggested, absurdly in my view) that the entire new creation had now arrived and that there was nothing more to hope for. There is, actually, a secular parody of this that was quite popular in the Western world, at least until the events of September 11, 2001: the belief that history had now developed as far as it was going to do, that Western capitalism and liberal democracy had “won” the Cold War, and that the whole world would now come into line with the brave new “enlightened” world. One does not hear this proposal so often today. But again, we may here be looking at one of the reasons why critics in the modern period were unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that the evangelists might really have believed that God had become king through the work of Jesus. It may not have been objective historical analysis on the critics’ part. It could just as easily have been because their whole culture, that of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Europe and America, believed implicitly that some kind of utopia had now arrived— through the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideology. The fact of continuing intractable evil in today’s world has highlighted the necessity to think again.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But the evangelists did not need to think again, because the claim that they were making was never susceptible to falsification on the grounds of continuing evil, corruption, violence, and death. On the contrary, this merely reminds us that, for all the evangelists in their different ways, the kingdom was precisely not to be expected whole and entire, all at once. They highlighted, after all, those parables in which Jesus stressed that the kingdom was coming like a seed growing slowly and secretly or that it would involve strange reversals as well as sudden vindications. The kingdom was not, they insisted, arriving in the way people had imagined. That is Luke’s explicit point in 19:11, and it does not appear that he is out on a limb. They constantly remind us that Jesus’s kingdom work generated angry opposition from both human and nonhuman (i.e., demonic) sources, that the shadow of the cross hung over the narrative from the start, and that Jesus warned about the need for his followers too to put aside any dreams of an immediate utopia and to be prepared to drink the cup that he was to drink. That leads us once again to Mark 10, where, in response to the request from James and John that they might sit at his right and his left “in his kingdom” (a request partly echoed, in Luke 23:42, by the dying brigand), Jesus asks a question in return: “You don’t know what you’re asking for!” Jesus replied. “Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? Can you receive the baptism I’m going to receive?” “Yes,” they said, “we can.” “Well,” said Jesus, “you will drink the cup I drink; you will receive the baptism I receive. But sitting at my right hand or my left—that’s not up to me. It’s been assigned already.” (10:38–40) The significance of this in our present discussion is massive. For Mark, it is clear that the two brigands on Jesus’s right and left, as described in 15:27, are the ones to whom “it’s been assigned already.” But that means, as we might have concluded from other evidence too, that Jesus’s crucifixion is the moment when he becomes king, when, as James and John say, he is “there in all [his] glory” (10:37). That is the powerful—if deeply paradoxical!—“coming of the kingdom” as spoken of in Mark 9:1. But the arrival of the kingdom in that way will not mean that James and John, and many others too, can look forward to an easy utopia thereafter. On the contrary, they will still have to drink Jesus’s cup and be baptized with his baptism, in other words, to share his suffering and quite possibly his death. (This happened to James quite quickly, as we discover in Acts 12:2.)

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But you haven’t yet figured out how to adjust them individually, and the sound is strange and distorted. Each of the four needs to be sorted out. Otherwise, when you’re listening to orchestral music, you’ll get too much violin or perhaps woodwind and no cello or brass. Now, one of the reasons the gospels are such a challenge to read is that there are four strands, four dimensions, that contribute to what they are saying, which in much modern reading have become distorted in something like the same way. Some of them have been turned way down or even silenced altogether. Others have been turned up too loud, so that they are shrill and crackly. One way or another, the music is out of balance. Some parts are almost inaudible, and other parts are all too audible, blasting out at top volume, distorted in themselves and drowning out everything else. Of course, this isn’t the same in all readings of the gospels. Different Christian traditions have twiddled the knobs on these four speakers, making this or that one louder or softer. But the point I want to make in this part of the book is that we only get the correct sound when all four are properly adjusted. Part of our difficulty, in fact, is that so many people have become used to hearing the gospels in a distorted fashion that when the speakers are adjusted properly, they are likely to object. “We never heard it this way before,” they will say. It reminds me of the time when, as a young teenager, I sat for the first time in the back row of the school orchestra (I had been drafted to learn the trombone on the quite reasonable grounds that I could sing in tune and blow hard, which are the first and principal requirements for that splendid instrument). Whereas before I had always experienced classical orchestral music through a radio or record player (this was long before any of us had stereo systems), from which the music all came out in an undifferentiated composite sound, for the first time I was able to appreciate the almost geographical as well as tonal difference between the woodwinds and the cellos, the brass and the violas, and so on. It was disconcerting to begin with, but ultimately revelatory. So, when people object that they haven’t “heard” the gospels before in the way I am now going to suggest, the best answer is to invite them to listen more closely and to see if the things they have always “heard” in the gospels might actually be enhanced, given more depth and body, in this new multilayered reading.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  For example, I had lived and was treated as a man for many years, yet I always felt rather ambivalent about belonging to that class. Sometimes when my female friends would go off on a tirade about men in general, I would join in with them, not because I hated men or enjoyed making generalizations about people, but as a way of expressing the fact that I did not feel like a man. That identity never made sense to me given my constant struggles with gender dissonance, the persistent body feelings I experienced that informed me that there was something not quite right with my being physically male, and my personal history of consciously exploring and expressing my femaleness and femininity both in my imagination and in public. I gravitated toward genderqueer identities for most of the years that I was male-bodied—at different points, viewing myself as a boy who wanted to be a girl, a crossdresser, and bigender—because they resonated with the myriad of gendered experiences that I had had up to that point. They captured the fact that, at the time, I really did feel like I was straddling both maleness and femaleness in some way. Genderqueer identities no longer resonate with my experiential gender in the same way. This is not to say that I now denounce them altogether, as I know firsthand just how rewarding and empowering it can be to see yourself as being outside, in between, or transcending both femaleness and maleness. It’s just that at this point in my life, I don’t feel genderqueer anymore. Experiencing the world (and my own body) as female makes the word “woman” feel like a far better fit for me now. Unfortunately, I have met a few genderqueer-identified people who have expressed suspicion or have been dismissive of the idea that someone could “transition” from genderqueer to unapologetically woman or man. Such assertions are clearly the product of gender entitlement, of these individuals projecting their own perspectives and beliefs onto other people’s gendered bodies, identities, and experiences. However, the majority of the transgender people I know understand that our experiential gender is potentially fluid and often changes over time as we accumulate new experiences.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Such scholars have normally supposed this great coming event to be the Parousia. The word parousia is a Greek term meaning “royal presence” or “divine appearing,” or perhaps both. It has become the regular technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to Jesus’s “second coming” and its supposed attendant phenomena, which, they maintain, the early church believed to be “imminent.” Early Christians thought, say these scholars, that the Parousia would be the final kingdom-bringing moment. That scholarly mistake has fused with the dispensationalism of popular (mostly American) subculture and speculation to give the present state of confusion about the “end-times” that is so prominent a feature of today’s American church life. The four gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom’s arrival—that is, the claim that God was already king of the world and had become so in a dramatic new way through the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus—was highly paradoxical in their own context, as indeed it has remained so to our day. Then, as now, a claim about God’s kingdom being already present was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder: “Of course God’s kingdom hasn’t arrived—just look out the window!” The problem was more acute for them, facing hostility and often persecution. However, they were in no danger of having what today we might call an overrealized eschatology, imagining (as some today have suggested, absurdly in my view) that the entire new creation had now arrived and that there was nothing more to hope for. There is, actually, a secular parody of this that was quite popular in the Western world, at least until the events of September 11, 2001: the belief that history had now developed as far as it was going to do, that Western capitalism and liberal democracy had “won” the Cold War, and that the whole world would now come into line with the brave new “enlightened” world. One does not hear this proposal so often today. But again, we may here be looking at one of the reasons why critics in the modern period were unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that the evangelists might really have believed that God had become king through the work of Jesus. It may not have been objective historical analysis on the critics’ part. It could just as easily have been because their whole culture, that of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Europe and America, believed implicitly that some kind of utopia had now arrived—through the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideology. The fact of continuing intractable evil in today’s world has highlighted the necessity to think again. But the evangelists did not need to think again, because the claim that they were making was never susceptible to falsification on the grounds of continuing evil, corruption, violence, and death.