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 Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Aunt Rosa offered them coffee while Uncle Danny talked to them as if they were normal people. We children scuttled into the hall, peeping around the corner at this bizarre intrusion. Who were they? The leaner one dipped her head, rested her index finger against her temple, propped her elbow against the armrest. A familiar movement. Little by little I began to recognize her, the jaw line, the chin and the timbre of her voice, silvery, gentle. I came out from my hiding place, a little closer and a little closer, until I reached out and touched her arm. “Excuse me. Are you my mom?” The adults continued their conversation. “Excuse me. Who are you? Are you my mom?” She turned toward me. “So, you’ve finally recognized me. Yes, I’m your mother.” “And I’m Mary Ann,” the other woman said, her cheeks indenting into deep dimples. They both smiled, and I realized they were not as scary as I’d first thought. My mother rested her hand lightly on my shoulder. “I’ve come to get you,” she said. “I’ve come to take you to Synanon. Would you like to go to Synanon with me?” Her tone implied fun, like when my father said, “How ’bout we go see a movie?” I had not seen Theresa in more than two years, and at six years old I couldn’t fathom why she’d shown up dressed the way I imagined a murderer or someone who rode around on a big noisy motorcycle might look. What was Synanon? I knew it had something to do with her, the place she’d gone off to. I’d never thought of Synanon as a place I could visit. Rather, I thought of it as a secret. Catching the excitement in my mother’s voice, my younger cousins, barely older than babies, ran up, no longer afraid of the bald women. They grabbed my hands and jumped up and down, yelling, “Yeah, we’re going to Synin.” “No. No.” Aunt Rosa pulled our hands apart. “Only Celena,” she said in her accented English. She physically prodded me out of the living room and down the hallway to my cousin Donna’s room, where I’d left my small suitcase when I’d arrived earlier in the day. My cousins followed us, watching silently while I retrieved my overnight case and my favorite doll, a Baby Alive from Toys “R” Us. A short time later, I left my aunt and uncle’s home with my mother and Mary Ann. I sat in the back seat of their car while Mary Ann drove and the two women talked to each other, the headlights from the traffic glinting off their earrings. I fell asleep, and when next I woke, we’d arrived at our destination. We stepped from the car, and I clutched my stranger mom’s hand as we walked across a desolate street to a large, rundown building. Trash fluttered across the sandy, cracked sidewalks. The air was cold and laced with the salty scent of the nearby ocean.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  The guy sitting next to you swivels and says, “Those fucking bums don’t know how to handle the full court press.” You nod and fill your mouth with beer. He seems to expect a response, so you ask him what period it is. He looks you up and down, as if you were carrying a volume of poetry or wearing funny shoes. “Third quarter, ” he answers. Then he turns away. You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country. You’d like to be the kind of guy who can walk into a bar or an eatery and break the ice with a Runyonism about the stupidity of a certain mid-season trade. Have something to hash out with truck drivers and stockbrokers alike. In high school, you went in for lone-wolf sports—tennis and skiing. You’re not really sure what a zone defense is. You don’t understand the sports metaphors in the political columns. Men don’t trust a man who missed the Super Bowl. You would like to devote a year to watching every athletic event on ABC and reading all fifty-two issues of Sports Illustrated . In the meantime your strategy is to view one playoff game in each sport so as to manage remarks like, “How about that slap shot by LaFleur in the third period against Boston?” Third quarter? It’s five-twenty and raining when you leave the bar. You walk down to the Times Square subway station. You pass signs for GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS , and one that says YOUNG BOYS . Then, in a stationery store, DON’T FORGET MOTHER’S DAY . The rain starts coming down harder. You wonder if you own an umbrella. You’ve left so many in taxis. Usually, by the time the first raindrop hits the street, there are men on every corner selling umbrellas. Where do they come from, you have often wondered, and where do they go when it’s not raining? You imagine these umbrella peddlers huddled around powerful radios waiting for the very latest from the National Weather Service, or maybe sleeping in dingy hotel rooms with their arms hanging out the windows, ready to wake at the first touch of precipitation. Maybe they have a deal with the taxi companies, you think, to pick up all the left-behind umbrellas for next to nothing. The city’s economy is made up of strange, subterranean circuits that are as mysterious to you as the grids of wire and pipe under the streets. At the moment, though, you see no umbrella vendors whatsoever. You wait fifteen minutes on the downtown platform. Everywhere you look you see the Missing Person. An announcement is made that the express is out of service. The tunnel smells of wet clothing and urine.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “You know what that means? Or don’t they teach you that in junior year?” “Okay, Steve,” Phil said, standing between him and Mason. “We get it. Off-limits. It’s your house. You get to set the rules.” Too late, Mason realized it had been a mistake to come to Steve’s house so he hightailed it up the stairs. In the kitchen Dr. Osner was scooping Breyers ice cream into two bowls. “Everything all right?” Dr. Osner asked. “Yes, sir,” Mason answered. “Everything is fine.” He hoped Dr. Osner wouldn’t recognize him from that day his brother had dragged him to his office, his face swollen with a toothache. His brother’s girlfriend worked for Dr. Osner, but no one was supposed to know they were going together. Something about Christina’s family being Greek and Jack’s being Irish. Their secret was safe with him. He had plenty of secrets, and he kept them all to himself. He grabbed his jacket and was out of there, glad his dog was spending the night at Phil’s house. What really bothered him was that he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong when he’d danced with that girl. He’d caught a glimpse of her doing the Lindy with some boy who barely came up to her chin and he’d liked the way she looked, liked the dimple in her cheek when she smiled, the long hair flying. He just got a feeling that it would be nice to hold her. When he did, she didn’t talk, didn’t say a word. And neither did he. Just the music and the feel of her in his arms. Yeah. That was all. She didn’t flirt, didn’t play games, just moved with him. Just that. MiriSuzanne was spending the night at Robo’s house on Byron Avenue. So Natalie’s father drove Miri home. Miri was sure when Mr. and Mrs. Boros named their daughter “Roberta” they never expected her to be called Robo. She enjoyed having Dr. O to herself. “What’s new and exciting, Miss Mirabelle?” He had a special name for her, but when it came to new and exciting she couldn’t tell him about the mystery boy, so she didn’t say anything. “Still working on the school paper?” Dr. O asked, and he seemed really interested. “Yes, but we never get to cover any exciting stories. Just the same old Christmas pageant and the annual food drive.” “Say you were interviewing me,” he said. “What would you ask?” “I’d ask what made you become a dentist.” He laughed. “Really, you’re interested in teeth?” “I’m interested in people.” “That’s what I like about being a dentist,” he said. “My patients.” Miri was his patient. So was the rest of her family. “Were you always checking your friends’ teeth when you were young, saying, ‘Open wide’?” He laughed again. “I was more interested in music. But my brothers were dentists. They encouraged me to go to dental school. We practiced together for a while.” “Where are they now?” He hesitated.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  And yet, as we’ve seen, some men instrumentalize genital arousal: what girls ‘say they want’ and ‘what they respond to’ are totally different things; ‘her body is screaming out’ for sex. Sex research, too, avidly probes arousal. Research by Meredith Chivers and colleagues has elicited much excitable commentary. In one key study, subjects lie back on a comfortable recliner, with measurement devices fitted to their genitals – a penile plethysmograph fitted around the penis shaft, which measures changes in penile volume, and a vaginal plethysmograph (a small, acrylic probe the size of a tampon) inserted into the vagina, which records changes in blood flow in the vagina’s inner lining using light reflectance. Subjects watch a range of stimuli on video: a man and a woman having sex; a naked man walking along a beach; a woman and a woman having sex; a man giving another man oral sex; and a pair of bonobos having sex. All are on view for ninety seconds, and each interspersed with a video of a natural setting with no humans, designed to bring the readings back to a baseline. The men tend to respond with genital arousal – erections – only to that which they say they are aroused by: to men, or women, or both, depending on their sexual orientation, but not usually bonobos. In contrast, the women, regardless of their stated sexual orientation, respond with genital arousal to each and every clip, including that of the apes. Their arousal is, in the lingo, non-specific, while men’s is specific – specific to their stated sexual desires and orientations. Women, it seems, are physically turned on by everything. There is more: women may be physically turned on by everything, but, crucially, they say they’re not. Subjects also have a keypad at their disposal, with which they rate their own subjective feelings of arousal. Women display genital arousal to a greater range of stimuli (including the bonobos), but they also display what is called greater ‘non-concordance’ between their genital arousal and their subjective sense of arousal: their bodies’ responses fail to tally with what they say they feel. Because women seem to be physically aroused by everything – almost comically so – they are, we’re told by commentators, much more ‘like men’ – voracious, lustful – than the usual stories about female sexuality state. Simultaneously, women are also more unlike men; more unruly in their polymorphous perversity, responding genitally to all manner of visual stimuli. It is women, not men, who respond to the bonobos.*

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Some of the language I loved and call on to this day, and some of it caused the most bizarre trauma I’ve ever experienced.” Think of all the performative verbs that come up in religious scenarios: bless, curse, believe, confess, forgive, vow, pray. These words trigger significant, consequential changes in a way that nonreligious language just doesn’t. The phrase “In the name of God” can allow a speaker to wed, divorce, even banish someone in a way that “In the name of Kylie Jenner” cannot (unless you truly do worship at the altar of Kylie Jenner, believing she has sole jurisdiction over your life and afterlife, in which case, I stand corrected, and I wish I’d interviewed you for this book). You could very well say “In the name of God” (and certainly “In the name of Kylie Jenner”) in a nonreligious way. Scriptural phrases pervade our daily secular lives—just think of Bible-themed slang like #blessed. But these expressions assume a special, supernatural force when stated in a religious context, because the speaker is invoking what they believe to be the ultimate authority to imbue their declaration with meaning. “Religious language involves us in the largest context of all,” Eberle writes. It’s beyond the domain of the workplace or politics; if someone really believes, it’s beyond all of space and time. Eberle continues: “While a baseball umpire calling ‘Y’er out’ is performative within the ballpark in the context of the game, religious language involves the performance of a person’s whole self and very existence.” There’s a reason most religions encourage prayer: Language strengthens beliefs. In her studies of contemporary witches and “charismatic Christians” (if they do say so them selves* ), psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that if one wants to know their higher power—if they want that deity to seem real—they have to open their mouths and speak to them. The theological vocabulary between the Christians and witches Luhrmann observed was quite different, but for both, repeatedly engaging in prayers or spells “sharpened their mental imagery” of the figure on the receiving end. Practice talking to a spiritual authority over and over again, and in time, you’ll conjure the experience that Yahweh or the alien overlords or whoever you’re chatting with is talking back. Eventually, when certain spontaneous thoughts pop into your mind during the conversation (or what Luhrmann calls an “imaginal dialogue”)—say, a certain person’s face or a scene that seems to answer a question you’ve been pondering—these thoughts will seem not self-authored but instead as though they are coming straight from your higher power. People need something to help make the supernatural feel real, Luhrmann told me, and language does precisely that. In order to keep the tremendous power of religious language healthy and ethical, it must be confined to a limited “ritual time.” This refers to a metaphorical domain in which using Biblical words like “covenant” or Tibetan chants suddenly seems completely appropriate.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Another problem with traditional morality is that it usually requires allegiance to some strong authority such as a dominant religion or widely accepted cultural norms. In pluralistic societies where there is no single authority, “thou shalt nots” lose some of their potency as once sacrosanct beliefs about proper conduct are scrutinized and challenged. Doctrines that reduce profound and complex ethical issues to simplistic moralisms tend to be particularly brittle in the face of such scrutiny, partly due to their inflexibility, and partly because they are so often founded on little more than ignorance, custom, or prejudice. Consequently, when externally imposed moral codes weaken, those who once believed in them often feel bewildered and disillusioned. More than a few embark on a frantic and fruitless search for new absolutes. As you have looked at the contradictions within the erotic mind, you’ve become familiar with another feature of don’t-do-it morality: prohibitions have of a way of increasing one’s fascination with the very acts they seek to suppress. You know that children who grow up surrounded by sexual restrictions stand a much better chance than most of becoming adults who are ambivalently and guiltily drawn to forbidden behavior. These and other flaws inherent in conventional morality cause some people to swing to the other extreme and reject all ethical considerations as antierotic. Some even convince themselves that sex and morality have little or nothing to do with each other. For a time disconnecting the two can be liberating, as it was for so many during the sexual revolution of the 1970s when a popular slogan was “If it feels good, do it!” Before long, however, that credo proved to be as vacuous as the pious moralisms it sought to supplant. Unless it is grounded in a conscious understanding of how one wishes to live and what truly matters, sexual liberation ultimately becomes an empty goal. Fortunately, there’s an alternative approach that avoids the pitfalls of either extreme: The erotically healthy person develops a clear set of ethical values that possess intrinsic personal meaning and applies them in the sexual arena. Personal values frequently overlap with traditional morality, but they operate quite differently. When we obey or pay lip service to standards of conduct passed down from on high, we tend to do so out of obligation, fear, guilt, or habit. Conversely, we honor our own values because we genuinely believe they have a direct impact on the quality of our lives. Value-based decisions are more likely to shape how we actually behave when they are forged from firsthand experiences and careful observations.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Your half brothers.” She didn’t want to look but she couldn’t help herself. The boys were little, maybe four and six. The wife was blond, pretty, not put-together-pretty like Corinne, but casual pretty. She was younger, with chubby cheeks, wearing Capri pants and a shirt. Posed like a movie star—leaning back against a tree with one foot on the ground and the other leg bent at the knee, her foot up against the tree, making it look as if the bottom half of that leg were missing. Miri passed the photo back without commenting. “Jeffrey and Josh,” Frekki said. “Those are your brothers’ names.” “What’s your wife’s name?” Miri asked Mike Monsky. “Adela.” “Adela. What kind of name is that?” “It’s an old family name.” “Is she Jewish?” “That’s a personal question, Miri,” Frekki said. “I thought we were getting personal.” “She’s half, but we’re raising the boys Jewish,” Mike Monsky said. “I work in my father-in-law’s business.” As if she cared enough to ask, What business? He told her anyway. She knew he would. “Shoe stores,” he said. “He’s got a chain of shoe stores.” Did that mean Mike Monsky was rich? As if he could read her mind he added, “He’s got two sons working in the business, besides me. We were all in the Pacific together.” “Uncle Henry was in the war. He got shot in the leg.” “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mike Monsky said. “How about you?” Miri asked. “Did you get shot?” “No, I was lucky.” “Rusty says they used to call you ‘Lucky.’ ” This was a complete lie. She didn’t know why she said it. “Really? I never heard that.” “Neither did I,” Frekki said. “Lucky you didn’t get caught getting someone pregnant before Rusty.” She was getting in too deep now. “That’s a joke, right?” Mike Monsky asked. She shrugged. “If you say so.” “My daughter’s got a great sense of humor,” Mike said to Frekki, who just shook her head. Then he turned back to Miri and smiled. She didn’t want to like his smile but she did. “Please stop calling me your daughter,” she told him. “You don’t know me.” “You’re right. But I hope I’ll have the chance to remedy that.” Frekki looked at her watch. “I don’t want to break this up but I’ve got to get home. We have company coming for dinner. Don’t forget,” she reminded Mike, “seven-thirty, in a tie and jacket.” “Go ahead,” Mike Monsky told Frekki. “I’ll make sure Miri gets home safe and sound and I’ll see you later.” “Take the Cadillac.” Frekki passed her car keys to him. “I’ll take the Buick.” In the car, he turned on the radio. Pete Seeger and the Weavers were singing “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”—a song that perfectly described her feelings about today. She bet he was sorry he’d turned to that station. Maybe he did it so he wouldn’t have to talk to her on the drive home.

• From Cultish (2021)

  In cultish scenarios, however, it’s often a deliberate method of undermining the fundamentals of truth so followers will come to depend wholly on the leader for what to believe. The term “gaslight” originates from a 1938 British play of the same name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she’s gone mad. He does this in part by dimming the gaslights in their house and insisting that she’s delusional every time she points out the change. Since the 1960s, “gaslighting” has been used in everyday conversation to describe one person’s attempts at tricking another into mistrusting their entirely valid experiences.* “Gaslighting sometimes happens when words are used so people can’t quite understand,” explains sociologist Eileen Barker. “They become confused, made to feel fools. Words can sometimes mean the exact opposite of what you think they mean. Satanic groups do this, where evil means good and good means evil.” Loaded language and thought-terminating clichés (like Shambhala’s “why don’t you sit with that”) can prompt followers to disregard their own instincts. “Words,” says Barker, “can make it so you don’t quite know where you are.” In Scientology, by far the most exotic form of gaslighting shows up in a process called Word Clearing. I could not believe my eyes the first time I read about this dizzying ex ercise, through which a follower strips their vocabulary of what the church calls misunderstood words, or MUs. “According to church doctrine, the reason all of you reading this essay aren’t sitting in a Scientology course room right this minute is because you have MUs,” wrote ex-Scientologist Mike Rinder for his blo g. “LRH’s tech is flawless and not to be questioned—everything he wrote is easy to understand and makes perfect sense. If something can’t be grasped, it’s simply because a person bypassed an MU.” While reading Scientology literature during a course or auditing session, a member must demonstrate that they’ve fully understood every word in the text by the church’s standards. You do this by grabbing a Scientology-approved dictionary (they endorse a select few publishers) and looking up each MU you cross. If any new MUs appear in the original MU’s entry, you have to look those up, too—a dreaded process called a word chain—before you can continue reading. From the most obscure polysyllabic term down to the tiniest preposition,* every MU must be word-cleared. If you look up an MU and still can’t word-clear it, you must track down its derivation, use it in a sentence, then sculpt a physical demo of the sentence using Play-Doh. These wearisome steps are all part of Hubbard’s teaching methodology, Study Tech. How does an auditor decide you’ve misunderstood a word? Telltale signs might include displaying disinterest or fatigue (yawning, perhaps), and certainly disputing something you’ve read. Once, Cathy descended into a Word Clearing nightmare while reading a book called Science of Survival . In it, there was a chapter condemning homosexuality.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I had the cynical suspicion that he was going to give me the same sermon the chaplain at Scout camp had given to every new group of boys on their first day last summer. He would walk up to the edge of the lake, casually pick up a handful of stones and toss one in. “Only a pebble,” he would say musingly, as if the idea were just occurring to him, “only a pebble, but look at all the ripples it makes, and how far the ripples reach . . .” By the end of the summer we camp counselors all held him in open scorn. We called him Ripples. But Father Karl did not give this sermon. He couldn’t have. He had come by his faith the hard way, and did not speak of it with art or subtlety. His parents were Jewish. They had both been killed in concentration camps, and Father Karl himself barely survived. Sometime after the war he became a convert to Christianity, and then a minister. Some trace of Eastern Europe still clung to his speech. He had dark good looks of which he seemed unaware, and a thoughtful manner that grew sharp when he had to deal with pretense or frivolity. I had felt this sharpness before, and was about to feel it again. He asked me who I thought I was. I did not know how to answer this question. I didn’t even try. “Look at yourself, Jack. What are you doing? Tell me what you think you are doing.” “I guess I’m screwing up,” I said, giving my head a rueful shake. “No baloney!” he shouted. “No baloney!” He looked about ready to hit me. I decided to keep quiet. “If you go on like this,” he said, “what will happen to you? Answer me!” “I don’t know.” “Yes you do. You know.” His voice was softer. “You know.” He picked up another rock and hurled it into the river. “What do you want?” “Sorry?” “Want! You must want something. What do you want?” I knew the answer to this question, all right. But I was sure that my answer would enrage him even more, worldly as I knew it to be, and contrary to what I could imagine of his own wants. I could not imagine Father Karl wanting money, a certain array of merchandise, wanting, at any price, the world’s esteem. I could not imagine him wanting anything as much as I wanted these things, or imagine him hearing my wants without contempt. I had no words for any of this, or for my understanding that to accept Father Karl’s hope of redemption I would have to give up my own. He believed in God, and I believed in the world. I shrugged off his question. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted, I said. He sat down on a log. I hesitated, then sat a little ways down from him and stared across the river.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  There were touches of Anaïs’s style everywhere: her Spanish shawl thrown over the grand piano; a fireplace grate with surreal, swirling patterns; books neatly organized in the built-in bookcases. But whereas the eclecticism of the apartment she shared with Hugo in New York harmonized, here her things clashed with the Tudor-beamed ceilings, Rupert’s modern bargain-basement furniture, and a few vintage prairie-style pieces. Anaïs perched herself gracefully on the front edge of a square maple armchair. Pulling out my shorthand notebook, I asked, “Shall we deal with your correspondence first?” “Oh, I just said we’d do correspondence because Rupert was standing there. I don’t have any today. I invited you early so we could have a tête-à-tête. Rupert won’t be home for hours.” Nevertheless, I hushed my voice. “I need to know certain things in case Hugo calls again.” Anaïs smiled. “What do you need to know?” “How come Hugo thinks you have stayed with me, and that I attended UCLA and transferred to USC?” “I had to say that, Tristine. I hope you will forgive me.” She might have been waiting for me to say I forgave her, but I was waiting for her to explain, and finally she did, making Balinese dancelike movements with her hands as she spoke. “Just about the time you and I met in New York, Rupert left the Forest Service, and we moved here to Hollywood. Hugo was used to speaking to Renate as the voice of Rancho Sosegado, and I didn’t want to change that pretext. The problem was, it was a four-hour round trip from Hollywood to the Sierra Madre post office to pick up Hugo’s weekly letters. It was too much driving!” “Hugo thought he was mailing his letters to you at the rest ranch?” I asked to clarify. “Well I’d told him that the eccentric owner wouldn’t let guests receive mail at the ranch so he had to mail his letters to a P.O. box at the nearby town. But after Rupert and I got settled here in Hollywood, I told Hugo that the Sierra Madre post office had been shut down. Since Hugo had just met you, and you’d said you would be attending college in Los Angeles … Hold on. I want to look this up. You need to get this right, because Hugo, though he has a terrible memory about everything else, recalls in precise detail everything I tell him about my trips out here.” She disappeared from the living room and when she came back she was carrying not her diary as I had expected, but her large purse, from which she pulled a small manila accordion file box. She riffled through the box, finding the index card she was looking for, and held it curved in her palm so that I couldn’t see the writing. “November 17, 1962. I told Hugo you were a student at UCLA and doing some typing for me.”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “An anthropologist visiting our planet might conclude that ours is a culture gluttonous for pleasure and sexually ravenous. And yet, what I observe daily in my clinical practice is that for all of this pleasure-seeking behavior, all of this wanting of pleasure, very few of us seem able to fully experience the sensations or satisfaction we seek.” —Nan Wise, PhD, Why Good Sex Matters When I was twenty-two, I was certain there was nothing left for me in Brooklyn. I quit my job, sold all my things, and fled to Naples, Italy, a dreamy, smelly place where post-lunch naps feel legally mandated. After a monthslong stretch of fighting for a visa and building a robust social circle of seniors and pizza men, I had to flee again, because of the law. I packed a large, military-grade backpack, gifted to me by a lovestruck middle-aged man named Biagio, and took an overnight ferry to Split, Croatia. (The tattered bag was from the war, he said; I never learned which one.) Once I settled in a small village outside of the city, and my body acclimated to a diet of cabbage, smooth sausages, and supermarket wine, I met a man with a long fluffy ponytail at an underground club, or a club that felt underground to me, darkened with smoke and off-brand grunge. After flirting in simple English about whether my life in New York had been like Friends (“Is Joey real??” he asked), I went home with him, we started hooking up, and, somewhat abruptly and without negotiation, he ejaculated on my face. It stung. He handed me tissues to dab the fluids and then slipped into a soft pajama onesie, ready for bed. I didn’t think much of the experience, only that I had an interesting story to relay to friends and, one day, readers.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  For it doesn’t feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. It doesn’t punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be. Nor does it ham it up by miming a constricted throat: Lo, what I would say, were words good enough. Words are good enough. It is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes. In this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral rafters, both. Because nothing you say can fuck up the space for God. I’ve explained this elsewhere. But I’m trying to say something different now. Before long I learned that you had spent a lifetime equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough. Not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow. We argued and argued on this account, full of fever, not malice. Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page. I argued along the lines of Thomas Jefferson and the churches—for plethora, for kaleidoscopic shifting, for excess. I insisted that words did more than nominate. I read aloud to you the opening of Philosophical Investigations. Slab, I shouted, slab! For a time, I thought I had won. You conceded there might be an OK human, an OK human animal, even if that human animal used language, even if its use of language were somehow defining of its humanness—even if humanness itself meant trashing and torching the whole motley, precious planet, along with its, our, future. But I changed too. I looked anew at unnameable things, or at least things whose essence is flicker, flow. I readmitted the sadness of our eventual extinction, and the injustice of our extinction of others. I stopped smugly repeating Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly and wondered anew, can everything be thought. And you—whatever you argued, you never mimed a constricted throat. In fact you ran at least a lap ahead of me, words streaming in your wake. How could I ever catch up (by which I mean, how could you want me?).

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Why does this challenge have me flummoxed when other women seem to manage it without such intense turmoil and inner strife? My kids aren't rebelling against anyone at this point and they're not the ones throwing up roadblocks – I am. I cannot wrap my head around how logistically this is supposed to work. If I am to continue to be a good mother in the way I perceive good mothers to be, it means abrogating myself outside of my maternal duties. But the experiences of the past few weeks – flirting with men, talking to them, having sex, imagining the possibilities – has unleashed a previously forbidden side of myself I am unwilling to bottle back up. I am torn between what I have always believed a good mother to represent – complete devotion – and what I now think I need to be a complete person, which includes, but is not limited to, being a good mother.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I stood to throw away my napkins and stopped at the garbage can, watching. The black-haired girl was handing things from the dumpster to the others: a bag of bread, still in its packaging, an anemic-looking cabbage that they sniffed, then tossed back in. A seemingly well-established procedure—would they actually eat the food? When the black-haired girl emerged for the last time, climbing over the rim and slinging her weight onto the ground, she was holding something in her hands. It was a strange shape, the color of my own skin, and I edged closer. When I realized it was an uncooked chicken, sheened in plastic, I must have stared harder, since the black-haired girl turned and caught my glance. She smiled and my stomach dropped. Something seemed to pass between us, a subtle rearranging of air. The frank, unapologetic way she held my gaze. But she jarred back to attention when the screen door of the restaurant banged open. Out came a hefty man, already shouting. Shooing them like dogs. The girls grabbed the bag of bread and the chicken and took off running. The man stopped and watched them for a minute. Wiping his large hands on his apron, his chest moving with effort. By then the girls were a block away, their hair streaming behind them like flags, and a black school bus heaved past and slowed, and the three of them disappeared inside. —The sight of them; the gruesomely fetal quality of the chicken, the cherry of the girl’s single nipple. All of it was so garish, and maybe that’s why I kept thinking of them. I couldn’t put it together. Why these girls needed food from the dumpster. Who had been driving the bus, what kind of people would paint it that color.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  A brief silence. How dare she? I thought. This is how doctors—doctors like me—understand prognostication. I have a right to know. “We can talk about therapies later,” she said. “We can talk about your going back to work, too, if that’s what you’d like to do. The traditional chemotherapy combination—cisplatin, pemetrexed, possibly with Avastin, too—has a high rate of peripheral neuropathy, so we’d probably switch the cisplatin for carboplatin, which will protect your nerves better, since you’re a surgeon.” Go back to work? What is she talking about? Is she delusional? Or am I dead wrong about my prognosis? And how can we talk about any of this without a realistic estimate of survival? The ground, having already buckled and roiled over the past few days, did so again. “We can do details later,” she continued, “as I know this is a lot to absorb. Mostly, I just wanted to meet you all before our appointment Thursday. Is there anything I can do, or answer—besides survival curves—today?” “No,” I said, my mind reeling. “Thanks so much for stopping by. I really appreciate it.” “Here’s my card,” she said, “and there’s the clinic number. Feel free to call if anything comes up before we see you in two days.” My family and friends quickly wired through our network of medical colleagues to find out who the best lung cancer oncologists in the country were. Houston and New York had major cancer centers; was that where I should be treated? The logistics of moving or temporarily relocating or what have you—that could be sorted out later. The replies came back quickly, and more or less unanimously: Emma not only was one of the best—a world-renowned oncologist who served as the lung cancer expert on one of the major national cancer advisory boards—but she was also known to be compassionate, someone who knew when to push and when to hold back. I briefly wondered at the string of events that had sent me looping through the world, my residency determined by a computerized match process, only to end up assigned here, with a freak diagnosis, in the hands of one of the finest doctors to treat it.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  The photo on the mug depicts my family and me, all dressed up to go to the Nutcracker at Christmastime—a ritual that was important to my mother when I was a little girl, and that we have revived with her now that there are children in my life. In the photo I’m seven months pregnant with what will become Iggy, wearing a high ponytail and leopard print dress; Harry and his son are wearing matching dark suits, looking dashing. We’re standing in front of the mantel at my mother’s house, which has monogrammed stockings hanging from it. We look happy. But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family? What about my pregnancy—is that inherently heteronormative? Or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation (or, to put a finer edge on it, maternity) more a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down for queers than the mark of some ontological truth? As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition simply wither away? Will you miss it? Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I’m a special—a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook. When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? How can you tell; or, rather, who’s to tell? Tell your girlfriend to find a different kid to play house with, your ex would say, after we first moved in. To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  The slide show must be over, and if he could look down on the crowd he’d be able to spot Charlie. They could make their escape. They could get a cab, even, and he could lean on the window. When they got home, Charlie would rub his neck, insist on making him tea. He’d feel fine. He opened the door to the hall and heard a collective silence, as if they were all holding their breath, listening to someone make a speech. Only he couldn’t quite hear the speech. He looked down, but there was no one in the living room. They’d moved somewhere. He came downstairs slowly, not wanting to be startled. A sudden noise would make him vomit. But down in the living room was just the whir of the record, spinning past the last song, the needle arm retired to the side. Beer bottles and Cuba libre glasses, still half full, covered the tables and couch arms. The trays of canapés had been left on the dining table. Yale thought of a raid, some kind of police raid, but this was a private residence, and they were all adults, and nothing much illegal had happened. Probably someone had some pot, but come on. How long had he been upstairs? Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. He wondered if he could’ve fallen asleep on the bed, if it was 2 a.m. now. But no, not unless his watch had stopped. It was only 5:45. He was being ridiculous, and they were out in the backyard. Places like this had backyards. He walked through the empty kitchen, through a book-lined den. There was the door, but it was dead-bolted. He cupped his hand to the glass: a striped canopy, a heap of dead leaves, the moon. No people. Yale turned and started shouting: “Hello! Richard! Guys! Hello!” He went to the front door—also, bizarrely, dead-bolted—and fumbled till it opened. There was no one on the dark street. The foggy, ridiculous idea came to him that the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him. He laughed at himself, but at the same time: He saw no bobbing heads in neighbors’ windows. There were lights in the houses opposite, but then the lights were on here too. At the end of the block, the traffic signal turned from green to yellow to red. He heard the vague rush of cars far away, but that could have been wind, couldn’t it? Or even the lake. Yale hoped for a siren, a horn, a dog, an airplane across the night sky. Nothing. He went back inside and closed the door. He yelled again: “You guys!” And he felt now that a trick was being played, that they might jump out and laugh. But this was a memorial, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the tenth grade. People weren’t always looking for ways to hurt him. He found his own reflection in Richard’s TV. He was still here, still visible.

• From Like Family

  We wanted to look like Susan Sarandon in white panties but would settle for singing all the songs and learning how to do “The Time Warp” with drag-queen drama. Dressed in her baby-dolls and dancing on her mattress, Amber would sing, “I’ve been making a man with blond hair and a tan. ” “And he’s good for relieving my tension !” I’d belt back, gyrating my skinny hips for all I was worth. Amber had been wearing the same pink baby-doll nightgown for six years. Rubbed sheer in places, it had turned brownish, the bow at her neck floppy and chewed-looking. When Amber was wearing the nightie, there was no way to avoid her breasts, the physical fact of them. She was enormous, and had been approaching it incrementally since we were nine. There seemed to be no stopping her. All summer she wore tight white saddle-backed shorts with either a half-shirt with Dallas Cowboys bowed across her chest (once a guy said, leeringly, Nice team) or a scoop-neck pink T-shirt with iron-on bunnies and baby ducks. “Don’t believe a guy when he says he doesn’t like big tits,” Amber counseled. “They all do. They go right for them. Like radar.” When I insisted my boyfriend, Mark, liked them small, she snorted and sashayed out of the room, her breasts broadcasting their signal to a planet of predictable men. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure she was wrong. I wasn’t sure of anything where sex was concerned. Mark was my first real boyfriend, and I still wasn’t quite sure how I had secured him—after all, my last memorable physical contact with a boy had been Bill Mosher’s finger in my sweaty armpit. As mysterious as the whole thing was, I was part of a couple now, free to revel in all that it entailed—writing Mark’s name in all my notebooks, on my fingertips, on the knees of my jeans; getting escorted to the door of my U.S. government class after lunch; and the nightly phone calls, which, though we had nearly nothing to say, we couldn’t seem to end (you hang up first; no, you hang up first; no, you). Mark was gorgeous, with navy-blue eyes, a curly halo of sand-colored hair and lovely runner’s legs. The baffling thing was he thought I was gorgeous too, and told me so. I remember going to the mirror after a date one night to see if it could possibly be true, and it was. I was beautiful, and yet I could still see, in my sixteen-year-old face, the scrawny, needful girl Noreen had turned to one night, saying, “I’ll tell you what, child, you’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” She said it flatly and without malice because she had been thinking it, I suppose, and because it was true. Both were. I was ugly and I was beautiful. Somehow, the two didn’t cross each other out in me.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  30 Lecture 4: The Jesus movement and the Birth of Christianity • The problem was not only for outsiders; those who came to believe in Jesus were also “Greeks and Jews,” bringing their cultural perceptions with them. o The earliest Christians experienced what sociologists call “cognitive dissonance”: the apparent contradiction between their symbolic world and their experience. Such dissonance must be resolved through denial of the convictions, denial of the experience, or reinterpretation of the convictions in light of experience. o Within the symbolic world of the early Christians, Jesus ought not to have been the source of life because of the manner of his death. But their experience of the Holy Spirit’s power in their lives—a power that manifested itself in new capacities and that they saw as deriving from Jesus—made them call him both “Lord” and “Christ.” o To maintain both their experience and their symbolic world, the early Christians had to reinterpret their symbols in light of experience. o In order to get on with their own story, then, they had to come to grips with Jesus’s story, especially his death; thus, the process of reinterpretation that began at once led to the construction of the Passion accounts—the story of Jesus’s suffering—as the first part of the Jesus story to reach set form. A Complex and Tense Religion • From the time of its birth and earliest growth, Christianity was a complex and tension-filled religion. • Sociologically, it was underdetermined and parasitic: Beginning as a sect of Judaism, it was expelled from the synagogue and became a Gentile association (an intentional community) without obvious boundaries. 31 • Culturally, it was mixed, with a symbolic world shaped by a Judaism that was already Hellenized and with steady success among Gentiles rather than Jews. • Religiously, it made claims to an experience of ultimate power through the Holy Spirit that were cosmic but disproportionate to the actual situation of believers in the world. • Conceptually, the founding figure of Jesus presented a set of major challenges to understanding: Was he cursed or the source of blessing? If he was Lord, then what does that mean for monotheism? • Many of the subsequent issues faced by Christians would involve the same tensions that marked the entry of the religion into the world and its first expansion. Johnson, The Real Jesus. ———, The Writings of the New Testament, especially pp. 83–136. 1. Discuss the ways in which the “founder” of Christianity differs from the founders of Buddhism and Islam. 2. How does the concept of cognitive dissonance help explain the necessity of Christians to reinterpret their symbolic world? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  168 Lecture 23: The Rise of Islam and the Threat of Iconoclasm monophysitism, the teaching that emphasized the divine in Christ to the virtual elimination of the human. • The emperor Heraclius (610–641) met with monophysite leaders in an effort to construct a compromise understanding of Christ. o They declared that although there were two natures in Christ (as Chalcedon had defined), there was but a “single energy” (mia energeia). This proposal was popular with many, including Cyrus of Alexandria, but was rejected by Sophronius of Jerusalem. o Pope Honorius was consulted in 634; he responded with the idea of “one will” (monon thelema), from which the term monotheletism derives. o The patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, then composed a work called the Ecthesis, advancing the monotheletism understanding of Christ: Only the divine volition was active in Christ. The implication is that any real human obedience of Jesus directed toward God is eliminated. o A dogmatic edict in support of this understanding was issued by the emperor Heraclius in 638 and was confirmed by two synods in Constantinople in 638 and 639. • The declaration was staunchly opposed by three successive popes, who held to the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ: two natures in one person, with the implication that Christ as human had a real human will. But the major opponent to the monothelite variation of monophysitism was the theologian Maximus the Confessor (580–662). o An imperial secretary under Heraclius, Maximus abandoned the court and became a monk in 614. In the Persian invasion of 626, he fled to Africa, ending in Carthage.