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 The Fixed Stars (0)

  Around the same time, I noticed a new book in the den of our house. The book was on the shelf where my parents kept art books, and it read ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE in bold gray letters down its white spine. Inside were male nudes with ball gags and leather and elegant, velvety portraits of what I would later recognize as uncircumcised penises. There was a photo of a smirking old lady, the artist Louise Bourgeois, with a giant, ropy-veined statue of a cock tucked under her arm like a clutch. I remember the afternoon that I found it, how I turned the glossy pages with fascination and fear and the strange, slippery sense that adults call arousal. I never told my parents I’d found it. It wasn’t that they would have been angry; they’d put it on the shelf, so it was fair game. Making a big thing of it would have only made us all uncomfortable. Still I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want anyone to know how much it confused me. The year was 1986 or 1987, and by then AIDS was on every front page. I was learning that some people, a lot of people, thought people like my uncle were an abomination. Apparently this was sanctioned by the Bible. Some people thought people like my uncle deserved this new disease, this “gay plague.” I began to understand that the way my family understood gayness, and sex, even art, was not how everyone did. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I don’t remember how my parents told me that Jerry was sick. The last Christmas that Jerry was alive, the Christmas of 1987, my dad made a video of our holiday. He’d just gotten his first camcorder. We were at my aunt Tina’s house in California, and you can hear Mannheim Steamroller’s synth-classical Christmas album plinking in the background. The morning after Christmas we drove up to Santa Rosa, to Jerry’s house. In the final frames, the camera follows Jerry as he walks up the driveway to the barn. The way his legs work, the sun in his hair like tarnished brass: it really does look like me. Jerry died of pneumocystis pneumonia on March 6, 1988, in a hospital bed at Johns Hopkins. He was forty-two years old. He’d flown to Baltimore to join up with my grandmother, and they’d planned to travel together to New York, where Jerry would start an experimental drug regimen. But he was sick when he got off the plane in Baltimore, and they never made it. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My mother was forty-one when Jerry died. Her family—Joe, Elaine, the six surviving siblings—tipped from its axis. But in Oklahoma, it was hard to talk about. This is how it was almost everywhere, except San Francisco, maybe New York, and maybe LA. In many towns, this is how it still is.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  The wall that marked the Peramublation Line had probably been rebuilt many times because of these storms. Did you know a small piece of it still stood behind the new high school? A tiny bit of spittle collected at the corners of Boland’s mouth as he spoke, as though he were parched. It was an erotic froth, the milk of erotic starvation. On he went, about the differences between the New Haven Colony, which founded Norwalk in 1651, and the Connecticut Colony, which founded Stamford (or Stanford, because that’s what it was called then) in 1650. In 1686, when the Perambulation Line was first erected, New Canaan was still entirely part of both Norwalk and Stamford. The first private purchase on the Norwalk side of the line was in 1699, for land at Silvermine Hill. —Back then it was always two words, Boland said. Silver Mine Hill. Then.… Well, of course, the town was established as a church parish—I’m sure you know all this—Canaan Parish, so that the locals, the Stanford and Norwalk citizens, wouldn’t have to travel so far to go to church … It was a conversation designed to forbid. Finding a break in Boland’s filibuster, Maria’s son, Neil Conrad, moved in on Elena. He placed himself between her and Boland. Neil wore a tie-dyed turtleneck, patched jeans, and hiking boots. His hair was long. Elena wondered if he was going to play the game, the key party game, and if not, why Maria, who was here without her husband, had brought him. Elena considered his ectomorphic skeleton: what self-respecting adult would perch and grind against this boy in the act of love? Would Neil, only a year or two older than her own son, with his acne and his wavy, feminine hair, be someone with whom she could go home? Absolutely not. Young Neil mumbled in his confused way—under his halitotic breath—about how boring the party was and how boring this guy with the New Canaan stuff was—and then he began to fire questions at her. Elena had found herself the object of admiration from teenagers before. It was, she guessed, her nonjudgmental silences. They took this for listening. Anyway, as it turned out, Neil had just been through the training . That’s right. His mind was a carefully brainwashed version of Werner Erhard’s. He had spent weekends in an auditorium in which he could not leave to urinate, and now he had got It . He got that there was nothing to get . The effect of this had changed his life. Of the assembled in the party, he had chosen her to hear his message. Neil mumbled that he was now interested in the spiritual basis of what Vonnegut was doing with Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. Drawings of assholes and everything. Also there was a record called Dark Side of the Moon . Getting into some pretty far-out shit. “Breathe in the air,” Neil Conrad told Elena.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Finally, purity of the soul cannot be ensured without a constant vigilance concerning what it harbors within it that may be deceptive. It always runs the risk of being fooled, of being taken by surprise. This may happen through the interplay of resemblances and contrary natures that hide beneath analogous forms. Basil takes up the Greek adage that vices are closely akin to virtues and reinterprets it in terms of the devil’s tricks: at the door of each virtue, the devil has placed a door of vice that looks just like it. You think you’re knocking on the first one and it’s the other one that opens. So those who meant to be courageous reveal themselves to be fearful.19 But there can also be deception through proximity: the soul believes it loves the Lord and becomes enamored of his servants; or it begins by loving the beauty of a soul, but as the latter is manifested through the bodies that one looks at, the voices one listens to, the soul “comes to love, instead of the soul that speaks, that by which it speaks”20—somewhat as if, instead of loving a musician, one fell in love with their instrument.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The invariable implication of this assumption is that, with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution. “It is,” declares Professor John Dewey, “our human intelligence and our human courage which is on trial; it is incredible that men who have brought the technique of physical discovery, invention and use to such a pitch of perfection will abdicate in the face of the infinitely more important human problem. What stands in the way (of a planned economy) is a lot of outworn traditions, moth-eaten slogans and catchwords that do substitute duty for thought, as well as our entrenched predatory self-interest. We shall only make a real beginning in intelligent thought when we cease mouthing platitudes. . . . Just as soon as we begin to use the knowledge and skills we have, to control social consequences in the interest of a shared, abundant and secured life, we shall cease to complain of the backwardness of our social knowledge. . . . We shall then take the road which leads to the assured building up of social science just as men built up physical science when they actively used techniques and tools and numbers in physical experimentation.” 1 In spite of Professor Dewey’s great interest in and understanding of the modern social problem there is very little clarity in this statement. The real cause of social inertia, “our predatory self-interest,” is mentioned only in passing without influencing his reasoning, and with no indication that he understands how much social conservatism is due to the economic interests of the owning classes. On the whole, social conservatism is ascribed to ignorance, a viewpoint which states only part of the truth and reveals the natural bias of the educator. The suggestion that we will only make a beginning in intelligent thought when we “cease mouthing platitudes,” is itself so platitudinous that it rather betrays the confusion of an analyst who has no clear counsels about the way to overcome social inertia. The idea that we cannot be socially intelligent until we begin experimentation in social problems in the way that the physical scientists experimented fails to take account of an important difference between the physical and the social sciences. The physical sciences gained their freedom when they overcame the traditionalism based on ignorance, but the traditionalism which the social sciences face is based upon the economic interest of the dominant social classes who are trying to maintain their special privileges in society. Nor can the difference between the very character of social and physical sciences be overlooked.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  problem, but even Christians could not understand how a heretical Arian like the Goth Alaric had been allowed to plunder Catholic Rome. Part of the Christian response was to argue from history. Paulus Orosius, a Spanish protégé of Augustine, wrote a History against the Pagans, designed to show from a brief survey of all world history that there had been worse disasters in pre-Christian times and that the coming of Christ had made all the difference to the peace of the world. However, Orosius’s work seems thin stuff indeed compared with the response which Augustine was making at the same time: The City of God (De Civitate Dei). It was his most monumental work and it took him thirteen years from 413 to write. Augustine starts with a consideration of Roman history and ridicules the old gods, but his preoccupation quickly becomes wider than the single disaster for Rome, or even the whole canvas of Roman history. It turns to the problem at the centre of Augustine’s thought: what is the nature and cause of evil, and how does it relate to God’s majesty and all-powerful goodness? For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, ‘the loss of good’, since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness, though to understand why this should happen is ‘like trying to see darkness or hear silence’.38 It was understandable that the ex-Manichee should thus distance himself from the notion previously at the centre of his belief, that evil was a positive force constantly struggling for mastery with the force of light, but as a definition of evil it has often been criticized. On a visit to Auschwitz- Birkenau or the killing fields of Campuchea, it is difficult not to feel that, in human experience at least, pure evil is more than pure nothingness; nor does Augustine seek to explain how a being created flawless comes to turn towards evil – in effect, to create it from nothing.39 Only halfway through the work, at the end of fourteen books, does Augustine explicitly begin to take up the theme of two cities: ‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’.40 All the institutions which we know form part of a struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history. If this is so, the idea of a Christian empire such as Eusebius of Caesarea had envisaged can never be a perfect reality on earth. No structure in this world, not even the Church itself, can without qualification be identified as the City of God, as biblical history itself demonstrated from the time of the first murderer: ‘Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.’ Though this remains his principle, Augustine is occasionally incautious in expression, and does indeed identify the visible

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  The other black guy was Logan Krieg and he had a reading problem or something. He had constantly looked over Paul’s shoulder in English class. Krieg panicked visibly in class. When he began coming into school drunk or wasted, only the teachers were surprised. Krieg turned all the letters around in his assignments. He wrote baby writing. And then he pleaded with guys he didn’t even know, with white students, to cover up for him. Because he was trying to stay out of the special-ed class. He didn’t want to be in class with the retards. They all knew he was lying in class, lying about having done the homework, lying about having been sick, lying all the time, caught in this thick web of deceits, until he was immobilized by it. And then he was gone. Dropped out, shipped off somewhere, who knew? He wasn’t friends with anybody, really. That was Paul’s experience with black kids. There were a few at St. Pete’s and they all stuck together, too. They were brilliant and militant. For the rest of his information, Paul had to rely on reports from the idiot box. The Rookies had a black actor on it, and there was Sanford and Son . And in the dimly lit mausoleum that was his 11:10 Stamford Local, he remembered watching the news one night with his father, the night Angela Davis was acquitted. From the Naugahyde reclining chair that was his dad’s chief consolation, Benjamin called out listessly, drunkenly, at the screen: Fucking communist dyke cunt — Port Chester—where he was stranded—was something else altogether. Had Paul been able to leave the train then, to walk beneath its glittering electromagnetic force field, he would have trod streets without a white face on them. He had heard about places like this. These streets were the reason, probably, that his mother had repeatedly told him, when he was a kid, about a friend of hers who had set about crossing the railroad tracks. He had climbed up over an electric train, this boy, shortcutting from one side of the town to the other, and, on top of the train he had stood . To get a better view, maybe, or to feel the aggrandizement of standing on a train. But he had died in the process, of course. This story was where Paul had learned about electromagnetism. Because when the guy stood up he hit the voltage lines. The lines running over the train. After forty-five minutes, the conductor reappeared to tell Hood and the other sleepers the news. —Ladies and gentlemen, afraid we still don’t know when the train will be moving. Best thing is to just stay put here in the car and we’ll advise you as soon as we hear anything. Down to the other end to repeat the announcement. The next hours, in the deep part of the night, were as slow and ominous as the hours in a hospital waiting room.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the beginning of November, 1521, thirty of the forty monks left the Augustinian convent of Wittenberg in a rather disorderly manner. One wished to engage in cabinet making, and to marry. The Augustinian monks held a congress at Wittenberg in January, 1522, and unanimously resolved, in accordance with Luther’s advice, to give liberty of leaving or remaining in the convent, but required in either case a life of active usefulness by mental or physical labor. The most noted of these ex-monks was Gabriel Zwilling or Didymus, who preached in the parish church during Luther’s absence, and was esteemed by some as a second Luther. He fiercely attacked the mass, the adoration of the sacrament, and the whole system of monasticism as dangerous to salvation. About Christmas, 1521, the revolutionary movement was reinforced by two fanatics from Zwickau, Nicolaus Storch, a weaver, and Marcus Thomä Stübner.486 The latter had previously studied with Melanchthon, and was hospitably entertained by him. A few weeks afterwards Thomas Münzer, a millennarian enthusiast and eloquent demagogue, who figures prominently in the Peasants’ War, appeared in Wittenberg for a short time. He had stirred up a religious excitement among the weavers of Zwickau in Saxony on the Bohemian frontier, perhaps in some connection with the Hussites or Bohemian Brethren, and organized the forces of a new dispensation by electing twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples. But the magistrate interfered, and the leaders had to leave. These Zwickau Prophets, as they were called, agreed with Carlstadt in combining an inward mysticism with practical radicalism. They boasted of visions, dreams, and direct communications with God and the Angel Gabriel, disparaged the written word and regular ministry, rejected infant baptism, and predicted the overthrow of the existing order of things, and the near approach of a democratic millennium. We may compare Carlstadt and the Zwickau Prophets with the Fifth Monarchy Men in the period of the English Commonwealth, who were likewise millennarian enthusiasts, and attempted, in opposition to Cromwell, to set up the "Kingdom of Jesus" or the fifth monarchy of Daniel. Wittenberg was in a very critical condition. The magistrate was discordant and helpless. Amsdorf kept aloof. Melanchthon was embarrassed, and too modest and timid for leadership. He had no confidence in visions and dreams, but could not satisfactorily answer the objections to infant baptism, which the prophets declared useless because a foreign faith of parents or sponsors could not save the child. Luther got over this difficulty by assuming that the Holy Spirit wrought faith in the child. The Elector was requested to interfere; but he dared not, as a layman, decide theological and ecclesiastical questions. He preferred to let things take their natural course, and trusted in the overruling providence of God. He believed in Gamaliel’s counsel, which is good enough in the preparatory and experimental stages of a new movement. His strength lay in a wise, cautious, peaceful diplomacy. But at this time valor was the better part of discretion.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Reformation during its first five years was a battle of words, not of deeds. It scattered the seeds of new institutions all over Germany, but the old forms and usages still remained. The new wine had not yet burst the old skin bottles. The Protestant soul dwelt in the Catholic body. The apostles after the day of Pentecost continued to visit the temple and the synagogue, and to observe circumcision, the sabbath, and other customs of the fathers, hoping for the conversion of all Israel, until they were cast out by the Jewish hierarchy. So the Protestants remained in external communion with the mother Church, attending Latin mass, bowing before the transubstantiated elements on the altar, praying the Ave Maria, worshiping saints, pictures, and crucifixes, making pilgrimages to holy shrines, observing the festivals of the Roman calendar, and conforming to the seven sacraments which accompanied them at every step of life from the cradle to the grave. The bishops were still in charge of their dioceses, and unmarried priests and deacons performed all the ecclesiastical functions. The convents were still occupied by monks and nuns, who went through their daily devotions and ascetic exercises. The outside looked just as before, while the inside had undergone a radical change. This was the case even in Saxony and at Wittenberg, the nursery of the new state of things. Luther himself did not at first contemplate any outward change. He labored and hoped for a reformation of faith and doctrine within the Catholic Church, under the lead of the bishops, without a division, but he was now cast out by the highest authorities, and came gradually to see that he must build a new structure on the new foundation which he h ad laid by his writings and by the translation of the New Testament. The negative part of these changes, especially the abolition of the mass and of monasticism, was made by advanced radicals among his disciples, who had more zeal than discretion, and mistook liberty for license. While Luther was confined on the Wartburg, his followers were like children out of school, like soldiers without a captain. Some of them thought that he had stopped half way, and that they must complete what he had begun. They took the work of destruction and reconstruction into their own inexperienced and unskillful hands. Order gave way to confusion, and the Reformation was threatened with disastrous failure. The first disturbances broke out at Erfurt in June, 1521, shortly after Luther’s triumphant passage through the town on his way to Worms. Two young priests were excommunicated for taking part in the enthusiastic demonstrations. This created the greatest indignation. Twelve hundred students, workmen, and ruffians attacked and demolished in a few days sixty houses of the priests, who escaped violence only by flight.482

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Even at the time, knowing so little and still feeling reluctant to become the kind of professional he reviled, I felt viscerally that to kiss him for free would be an experience that would give me nothing in return, save for regret. I was slightly nervous to say no—he was standing close enough to me that it seemed he’d already taken my yes for granted—but I still said it, and pulled away, and left soon after. In the days following, though I’d refused the kiss, thoughts of irritation and regret shadowed me, specifically around the fact that I hadn’t been paid: Why did I gave this guy my time, for free? I wondered. I knew vaguely that I wasn’t simply looking to have affairs with married men, but I couldn’t yet admit to myself the straightforwardness of what, exactly, I wanted. In the beginning of my working life, I felt that I wanted to find a patron, not a client, and I wanted to sell a performance, not sex. I’m not sure what the physical difference was to me—I think I imagined there would be no penetration—but the actual relevant demarcation I know I made was between how the two scenarios might feel, and what those feelings would mean. If I wasn’t straightforwardly selling sex, I reasoned, but something more nuanced and shrouded, my relationship to sex, to myself as a woman, and to the world would not have to change quite so much. The two scenarios, in the end, did feel different from one another, just not in the way I’d anticipated—the performancepatron route simply felt like a lot more work, for a lot less money, wherein I was tasked with either deflecting requests for full-service or persuading someone that tipping me for my company wasn’t transactional but merely supportive. My friend, the capitalist, told me that unappealing men become hotter when they’re handing you cash. Sadly, cash has yet to turn me on. It’s just something I need. My first real sex work experience ended up being both blessedly well-circumstanced and entirely unglamorous: I acted as a third for a queer graduate student and her buttoned-up, graying sugar daddy, licking his ass in a studio apartment he kept in Midtown for just such an occasion. I walked away after ninety minutes with a grand in an unmarked envelope, more than I’d ever made in a week, let alone a day or an hour. It wasn’t sex, per se, but it wasn’t art, either.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  It is often extremely difficult to identify the cause of a headache; anyone who is prone to them will know this, and in some ways this dispenses them of any feelings of guilt when the cause is obvious and it is their fault: abuse of alcohol or too much sun. I haven’t been drunk more than two or three times in my life. On one of these occasions I was with Lucien who had slumped on top of me on the sitting room carpet, in front of his friends and unbeknown to his wife. He had taken me for dinner with a young couple who lived outside Paris. Without realising it I drank too much champagne. The couple lived in a big bungalow in which you walked straight into the kitchen which also served as a dining room. At the back of the room there were two doors next to each other, each leading to a bedroom. The evening must initially have started in their bedroom. I am trying to piece it together: Lucien takes me over onto the bed with help from the other man; they start touching me up, I undertake an investigation of their files. The young woman hangs back a bit, her friend takes her by the shoulders, kisses her, encourages her to come and lie down with us. She goes into the bathroom, he follows her and comes back explaining that ‘this isn’t Christine’s thing, but we can do what we like, it doesn’t bother her’. I partake in the goings on in the same way that I involuntarily follow a radio play echoing through the courtyard of my apartment building on a summer’s day. Probably out of respect for Christine, even though she doesn’t reappear – is she busying herself in front of the bathroom mirror or sitting indecisively on the side of the bath? – we move to the other bedroom.

• From Deprogrammed

  507 01:29:11,412 --> 01:29:13,448 a hundred miles away to a home, 508 01:29:13,481 --> 01:29:15,049 That was secluded where, 509 01:29:15,083 --> 01:29:17,151 I met Ted Patrick at the time. 510 01:29:17,185 --> 01:29:19,120 You don't think you're in a cult? 511 01:29:19,153 --> 01:29:21,422 -Right. 512 01:29:21,456 --> 01:29:25,827 What do you think you're in? 513 01:29:25,860 --> 01:29:26,494 It's a commune, 514 01:29:26,527 --> 01:29:28,129 it's a spiritual commune. 515 01:29:28,162 --> 01:29:31,632 You don't believe that you're under mind control, 516 01:29:31,666 --> 01:29:33,901 that you've been psychologically kidnapped? 517 01:29:33,935 --> 01:29:36,270 -No I don't. 518 01:29:36,304 --> 01:29:38,106 My parents were there when that happened, 519 01:29:38,139 --> 01:29:39,140 I came over at, 520 01:29:39,173 --> 01:29:41,109 2 in the afternoon after cooking, 521 01:29:41,142 --> 01:29:42,510 at the restaurant, 522 01:29:42,543 --> 01:29:45,079 still in my chef clothes, 523 01:29:45,113 --> 01:29:48,149 I wasn't even sure what deprogramming meant. 524 01:29:48,182 --> 01:29:49,083 When, 525 01:29:49,117 --> 01:29:50,518 Ted started questioning me, 526 01:29:50,551 --> 01:29:52,120 and telling me I needed to be deprogrammed, 527 01:29:52,153 --> 01:29:54,255 I said, from what? 528 01:29:54,288 --> 01:29:55,423 To me I was, 529 01:29:55,456 --> 01:29:57,091 leading my life of choice. 530 01:29:57,125 --> 01:29:58,459 I had a, 531 01:29:58,493 --> 01:30:01,696 a girlfriend, or several girlfriends over several years, 532 01:30:01,729 --> 01:30:04,565 and I really enjoyed what I was doing, 533 01:30:04,599 --> 01:30:07,568 Working 18-20 hours a day, 534 01:30:07,602 --> 01:30:11,439 seven days a week, for nothing. 535 01:30:11,472 --> 01:30:16,043 They made a mindless robot out of you. 536 01:30:16,077 --> 01:30:21,582 You've got to breathe, you're young, you've got the whole world before you. 537 01:30:21,616 --> 01:30:23,484 I think that's my parentstalking, 538 01:30:23,518 --> 01:30:24,986 saying here's this, 539 01:30:25,019 --> 01:30:26,154 this man, 540 01:30:26,187 --> 01:30:27,822 who did so well in highschool, 541 01:30:27,855 --> 01:30:30,425 one of the top athletes, top students, 542 01:30:30,458 --> 01:30:32,293 and here he is doingcooking, 543 01:30:32,326 --> 01:30:33,494 or dishwashing. 544 01:30:33,528 --> 01:30:35,263 Here he is, 545 01:30:35,296 --> 01:30:37,331 with no, 546 01:30:37,365 --> 01:30:39,300 get up and go. 547 01:30:39,333 --> 01:30:41,803 He's got his tail between his legs. 548 01:30:41,836 --> 01:30:43,905 That's an expression from my dad. 549 01:30:43,938 --> 01:30:52,613 But they don't know what I've really been involved with. 550 01:30:52,647 --> 01:30:54,916 The first time I was kidnapped was five days. 551 01:30:54,949 --> 01:30:57,618 On the fourth day, 552 01:30:57,652 --> 01:31:00,087 early in the morning I did try to get out of the room, 553 01:31:00,121 --> 01:31:00,822 and leave. 554 01:31:00,855 --> 01:31:03,024 So there was a confrontation. 555 01:31:03,057 --> 01:31:05,660 When you're slammed down trying to escape, 556 01:31:05,693 --> 01:31:07,462 you become more acquiescent. 557 01:31:07,495 --> 01:31:11,299 At that point it was like, ok, 558 01:31:11,332 --> 01:31:14,001 Yes mom, I love you.Yes mom, 559 01:31:14,035 --> 01:31:15,069 and dad,I,

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Perhaps everything I’d perceived during my childhood in San Jose was magnified through the skewed fun-house lens of my trauma. Were my memories a figment of my overactive, fear-focused imagination? Had everyone else been crying over unrequited crushes and not grades? Had everyone been as on edge as I remembered? It’s true that some of my closest friends had abusive parents. But had I been self-selecting in the people I’d chosen to love? Had I only been drawn to the few who were hurt, while overlooking the rest of my class? Since reading about damaged PTSD brains, I’d been losing faith in my own mind. Every time I tried to touch a memory, doubts and questions multiplied around it, preventing me from being able to see my own past. How much of my own experience had I projected onto other children because it was happening to me, because I hadn’t wanted to be alone? How much of my understanding of immigrant trauma was fabricated by a narrow reading of my own experience? And was this understanding, in fact, racist? I was casting abuse and bad parenting as a central theme across my community—was this perpetuating a negative, unhealthy stereotype? So this is why I am back: I want to know whether my trauma is personal or communal. I want to know the truth so I can fully understand my community of origin. To understand how place shaped me. And I want to know the truth because I can’t fact-check what happened within the walls of my childhood home. The only witnesses, my parents, are unreliable, and over the years they have denied nearly all of the violence they inflicted on me. But if my memories about our communal trauma are accurate, then that would validate the memories surrounding my personal trauma. It would validate my withered brain matter. My very sanity. — I don’t know if anyone in San Jose trusts me enough to tell me the truth because I have purposefully severed my ties to them for fifteen years. I ignored friend requests from everyone I went to high school with. I pretended I didn’t see them if they walked past me on my college campus. I deleted their DMs. I treated everyone from San Jose like that box of VHS tapes I hid at the top of my closet—part of a past I didn’t want to touch. But now I have to ask for their help.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and unconscious. The center from which all our energy comes I represented as a dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line. An infant has no intention that doesn’t come from its own little body requirements. That’s the way life begins. An infant is mostly the impulse of life. Then the mind comes along and has to figure out what it’s all about, what is it I want? And how do I get it? Now, above the horizontal line there is the ego, which I represent as a square: that aspect of our consciousness that we identify as our center. But, you see, it’s very much off center. We think that this is what’s running the show, but it isn’t. MOYERS: What’s running the show? CAMPBELL: What’s running the show is what’s coming up from way down below. The period when one begins to realize that one isn’t running the show is adolescence, when a whole new system of requirements begins announcing itself from the body. The adolescent hasn’t the slightest idea how to handle all this, and cannot but wonder what it is that’s pushing him—or even more mysteriously, pushing her.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He wasn’t picking up guys at Paradise or anything.” Yale wondered if Charlie had been protecting his reputation, Yale’s feelings, or both. He couldn’t have thought those guys from the suburbs would be safer. “You gotta understand,” Julian said, “this was why I didn’t feel so terrible about it. I mean, I did , but it wasn’t like I was breaking something unbroken, you know? And I wasn’t sure if you guys had more of an understanding than you let on. I guess not.” “How do you even know all this?” Yale wanted to ask who else might have known, but he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. Terrence had really seemed to believe he’d witnessed an isolated incident. But if Julian knew, surely Teddy did. He wondered about Asher, Richard, Charlie’s staff. “I mean, he always sort of confided in me. One time I saw him at Montrose Street Beach, like full-on knocking on some guy’s Audi window. After that he’d tell me things. He wasn’t bragging or anything, just unloading. He wasn’t happy about it. Like, why does anyone do that stuff? Either you’re having a blast, or you do it because you hate yourself, and I don’t think he was having fun.” Yale felt a lot of things clicking into place, pieces he hadn’t known were scattered around the recesses of his brain. He said, “And you didn’t tell me. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.” If Fiona was right, if no one really liked Charlie, why had they all protected him for so long? “I just—I wouldn’t want people talking about every mistake I made. That’s the sex police, you know? I’m not the sex police. Hey, I’m really sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry. You’re not—you’re not infected, are you?” Julian’s eyes filled with something like panic, as if the thought had only just occurred to him. Yale said, because it was true in the loosest sense, “I tested negative.” As of May. Well. He’d been negative, and lord knew how long Charlie had been exposing him to stuff. He stood up, made Julian stand up, hugged him. If Julian really was leaving on Sunday, he didn’t want their friendship ending in a fight. He could be angry later, on his own. He could draw targets on the wall, pictures of everyone who’d betrayed him, and he could throw darts at their faces. But he could also hold Julian tight for a second. It felt good. He said, “Sex police would be a great Halloween costume.” —He was awake till three. The odds of Charlie becoming infected after only one encounter, and then Yale becoming infected after only a few encounters with Charlie, would be minuscule. But now his statistical padding had disappeared. He knew that the virus didn’t care about fairness, about probability—but that didn’t make him any safer. Yale wondered suddenly if Charlie had even gotten tested at all, back in the spring.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  Specifically, he may be getting a wider sociological perspective that may lead him on to see his over-all activity in a different light. To repeat: On strictly methodological grounds it will be possible for the theologian to dismiss this new perspective as irrelevant to his opus proprium. This will become much more difficult, however, as soon as he reflects that, after all, he was not born as a theologian, that he existed as a person in a particular socio-historical situation before he ever began to do theology—in sum, that he himself, if not his theology, is illuminated by the lighting apparatus of the sociologist. At this point he may suddenly find himself ejected from the methodological sanctuary of his theologizing and find himself repeating, albeit in a very different sense, Augustine’s complaint that “Factum eram ipse mihi magna quaestio,” He is likely to find further that, unless he can somehow neutralize this disturbing perspective in his own mind, that it will be relevant to his theologizing as well. Put simply, methodologically, in

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  There were new people, but from what Yale had heard, they hated Charlie, and Charlie hated them, and it was, in general, a horror show. One of the stranger results of Charlie’s coke habit was that, following a long pause after that first letter, he’d taken to writing Yale manic eight-page missives about once a month. Yale suspected he wasn’t the only one receiving these letters, but he was presumably the only one for whom Charlie made obsessive lists with titles like “Dreams I’ve Had About You” and “Here Are All the Books You Left.” Some of them were darkly funny. “Ways I’ll Kill Myself If the Republicans Win This Fall” included an entry on letting leeches suck all his blood and then having someone serve those leeches at the inaugural ball. Charlie never proposed meeting. After that first, needy letter, he never asked for anything at all. Yale had become a figure in a writing exercise, a static memory for Charlie to bounce feelings off of. He never apologized, either, not in so many words. There were just the lists, and then, in jagged print that carved at the page, meticulous accounts of his days: what he ate, his weight, his digestive issues, the plots of movies he’d seen. He was keeping strictly vegetarian, and Dr. Vincent implored him to eat more protein. Teresa had gotten herself an apartment not far from Charlie’s, and Martin seemed a permanent appendage, although Charlie spared Yale any details about their sex life, including whether they even had one. Sometimes the letters weren’t about Charlie at all. Once, for no discernible reason, there were five pages about Wanda Lust, a drag queen who’d died before Yale even moved to the city. Yale tended to wait a few days before opening a letter. He’d sit, finally, on Saturday morning with coffee, consider the thickness of the envelope, and finally slide a finger under the flap. He’d never written back. Not out of spite or stubbornness so much as the fact that he couldn’t imagine where to begin. The letters had softened him on Charlie, at least a bit. Had made him seem less the villain and more the pathetic sap Yale had always known he really was. Over the past two years, he’d seen Charlie from a distance a number of times. He imagined Charlie had seen him from a distance too, on days when Yale was too distracted to notice. He imagined that Charlie caught his breath, turned, made some excuse to leave the party, the bar, the meeting—the same way Yale always did. Yale tried to picture an infected eyelid. Puffy , he assumed. Red. It made his own eyes water. They turned off the Drive and at least the engine was quieter now. Asher said, “I think he’s scared. I—Okay, I’m just going to say this. He wants to see you.” “I doubt it.” “No, he told me. Several times.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  Both irritant reactions and contact dermatitis are typically itch or irritation predominant. When they cause pain, it is not typically confined to a pinpoint spot, but no one told my vulva, nerves, or brain. Once I started thinking skin problem instead of infection, I realized I had run out of my free and clear detergent a few days before and popped down to the drugstore late one night and bought new laundry detergent. After topical steroids and rewashing everything in my regular detergent, in seventy-two hours I was fine. It is a great example of how symptoms can be confusing. I’m an expert, and my symptoms were in no way classic. I couldn’t do a proper self-exam, and my pain and recall biases led me to believe the sugaring was at fault. Thinking I had an ingrown hair or an abscess led me to make a bad decision with a pair of tweezers. The anxiety of my imagined obituary about how I died from a pubic-hair-removal experiment amplified my symptoms. How to Think About Your Symptoms The first step is to think about your bother factor and write it down or say it out loud so it sounds correct. Many women come to the gynecologist with bothersome symptoms, and then when we ask they have a hard time describing them. Some of this is the biological complexity that we have discussed. Some of this is the fact that in your brain, you know something is wrong or different, but you haven’t yet assigned it a spoken word. Often when people say their symptoms out loud, they realize they were really thinking of something else. Think about the list of symptoms at the beginning of this chapter and try to match one or more up with what bothers you the most. This is your bother factor. You can have multiple bother factors, but knowing the worst symptom can be helpful. Your bother factor can also be, “I am worried this is an STI or cancer.” If you can’t tell if one bothers you more, then simply say, for example, “My most bothersome symptoms are itch and irritation.” Consider the location of your symptoms: vagina (internal), at the vestibule (vaginal opening), or on the vulva (where your clothes touch your skin). Just remember, where you feel your symptoms may not be the actual source due to the wiring. Another option is to take a photo of the illustration of the vulva (image 11, opposite), mark on the image the location where you feel your symptoms, and then show the photo to your provider.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  * This book’s central preoccupation is with sex – and power – between men and women. Because, however, it is primarily about the effects of power imbalances and rigid gender norms on how we think about sex and violence, some of what I say will be relevant not just to sex between men and women – and similarly, will be relevant to cis and trans women alike. The particular quandaries affecting trans people’s experience of sex, as well as those in gay/queer relationships will, I hope, find some resonance and recognition in the dynamics I explore here, but the fine- grained texture of those quandaries are not mine to explore, and others are better placed to do that vital work.* In addition, if consenting to sex must also involve desire or enthusiasm, the implication is that those consenting to sex without desire – sex workers, for example – have not really consented. This makes the overriding of their agreement – their assault – meaningless, which in turn makes the protection of sex workers difficult.2 On Desire On AskMen, an online lifestyle portal, writer Coleen Singer states that, when it comes to sexual desire, men are in general ‘anticipatory’, while women ‘are generally responsive’. For most men, she explains, the desire for sex and feelings of arousal usually come before any sexual activity, and they drive the search for actual sex. Women do experience this ‘random, free-floating horniness that is associated with men’s sexuality’, but many, in contrast, also experience ‘responsive sexuality’ – desire triggered by ‘specific moments of romantic and sexual contact’. This stance, as we’ll see, emerges from recent, women-led sex research. It echoes, however, a fairly standard, if not clichéd, view of the differences between men and women, one also espoused by pick-up-artists who teach men techniques ‘guaranteed’ to get women into bed (and whose advice is strikingly continuous with other forms of sex and relationships advice). ‘Show a man the cover of Playboy, and he’s ready to go’, writes Neil Straus in The Game, his bestselling book on pick-up-artistry. ‘In fact,’ Straus goes on, ‘show him a pitted avocado and he’s ready to go.’ Women, in contrast, ‘aren’t persuaded as easily by direct images and talk’. Women, it seems, need persuading and take longer. Men are fast, women slow. It’s commonplace to frame male and female sexuality as two very different forces – and to explain these differences in evolutionary terms. Men are more sexually driven, the argument goes, motivated by their deep evolutionary history to spread their seed. Sex occupies a less central or urgent – indeed, a less sexual – place in women’s experience, because women’s evolutionary history motivates them to find reliable partners for the intimacy, security and responsibility that child-rearing requires. There is a deep, irrational, even pre-rational sexual drive in men, while sexuality lies outside of women, separate from their personhood, only brought in instrumentally or strategically in the service of other, higher aims (such as mothering).

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Tomorrow we’ll start running again after the leering clockwork chameleon that looks like the prince or princess in the fairy tales, but turns into a warted toad or a pincered cockroach when touched by mortal hands. Where, where to find that quality I long for that will grow goodly and green for fifty years—is it mind? Then Ray has mind, with a weaker body: thin, with no height, and you think of flat shoes, all your life long feeling big and swollen, lying like mother earth on your back and being raped by a humming entranced insect and begetting thousands of little white eggs in a gravel pit, and you think of Florida and sun, constraints of his society, loud clothes, all shrinking, paling, before the mind, and he perhaps ficklely loving delicate butterfly-like women of the insect kind, but there was the expert moving of his hands and head and tongue and the surprised knowledge that honest love could ignore defects and discrepancies of matter in the presence of lightning-crackling mind. Once I thought I could live with him, too. God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts. The doubts of past convictions only cast aspersions on present assurances and maliciously suggest that those, too, shall pass into the realm of the null and the void—and then tonight the sight of the poetic one, the wanting … what? to conquer? to talk? This first … after the “don’t kill me when you make love to me …” echoing in my ears. All these boys I love pieces of, and 3 years ago that would have been fine, but now, there is not one I know well enough, surely enough, to say, if asked: “O.K., here is a certificate guaranteeing that a Smith Phi-Bete-to-be, (maybe) potential minor poetess and story writer, onetime dilettante artist, reasonably healthy and attractive, alive, thinking, tall, sensuous, powerful, colorful white woman, age 21, is handing you 50 years during which she will love your faults, honor your bestialities, obey your whimsies, ignore your mistresses, nurse your progeny, paper the walls of your house with flowers, and adore you as her dying mortal god, conceive babies and new recipes in labor and travail, and remain faithful to you until you both rot and the inevitable synesthesia of death sets in.” I have to be terribly sure it (marriage) is neither a glamorous gamble nor an ephemeral escape. I know none of these three boysn well enough to give prognosis for a lifetime, even a vague general one. I would have to live with a personality over a period of frequent contact … The only boy I know really well is the one I know well enough that I can never marry nor love—oh, a love, a growing sharing would be so good, so uncomplex. And in these rapid most complex days of speed, mood, and psychology, it is relatively impossible to “know” anyone, as it is impossible to “know” oneself.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  T PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION his book was originally published in the middle of the contentious 2016 presidential election season. By describing historical patterns, it had the effect of bringing some clarity to the otherwise feverish rhetorical muddle. And yet, in the aftermath of the election, conventional wisdom did little to improve upon the preelection confusion. As ABC reported, Donald Trump’s shocking electoral success represented the “triumph of class over identity.” It made no sense otherwise to analysts caught short. If the undeniable factors of racism and misogyny did not tilt the balance at the polls, then “the surging return of class in politics” must have. Searching for explanations is natural, but ABC did as punditry is wont to do and produced a false dichotomy in its effort to find a simple answer. The truth is, it’s not one or the other: class and identity politics operate in tandem. 1 While it is true that the major candidates who competed in 2016 all fell back on some form of a class-conscious vocabulary in advancing their positions, it cannot be said that identity politics disappeared in the face of “surging” class issues. From the outset of the Democratic primary process, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was calling for a “class revolution,” he drew in enormous numbers of millennials across the social spectrum who felt the weight of college loans. Despite Sanders’s claims that his opponent was asking women to vote for her on the basis of her gender alone, front-runner Hillary Clinton directed her appeal to voters on economic issues common to “all working families.” From early on in the primary, she focused alike on the pocketbook issue of child care and the racial and class roots of inner-city violence. 2 Yet both the Democratic contenders had to make themselves likeable and familiar. Sanders looked like a rumpled professor and sounded like a vintage sixties radical, speaking truth to power. No wonder students liked him. Clinton drew in some of the younger Lean In audience, and also won over older African American women because of her proven loyalty to the black community. Emotional bonds dominate the imagined “conversation” between candidate and voter, with little overt reference to class. 3