Contentment

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 Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Being a second only works with clear communication. Not perfect communication but clear communication. Being a proper second requires being able to say: What’s your relationship status? Is it open? And if it is, live your best life. If it’s not, figure out the necessary boundaries. Being a second can be a phase of life—it’s a great role to play between big relationships. Or as you’re learning how you want to navigate open relationships. Or you might just be second to a particular person. I also enjoy being a primary, an only, or one of many. For some people, second can be an intimacy preference. I really enjoy being the other woman in a transparent scenario. I love doing my own work all week and having someone show up to romance and touch me and then go home. I love knowing my lovers have stability and support and home, that I am only responsible for my/our pleasure. I love having abundant nonstop sexy time for a few days and then not having to worry about anyone else’s needs until the next visit. Being second is very different from what I grew up learning about mistresses/affairs—the goal is not to steal your lover from their partner. You aren’t diminutive or pining. You’re satisfied. And, in alignment, your lover’s goal isn’t to keep you a secret, or to become first in your life, to displace your work or other lovers or other commitments. They’re enjoying the miracle of pleasure from another body. Ideally, they’re as grateful for your preexisting commitments as you are for theirs. Hot and Heavy Homework If you’re in a committed relationship, reflect on how it could benefit from you or your partner taking on a second. If you’re single or nonmonogamous, reflect on whether you might be a budding second. 125 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “Being a Second Lover Means Loving Yourself First,” September 20, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/being-second-lover-means-loving-yourself-first.126 “The Other Woman” is a song written by Jessie Mae Robinson and popularized by Nina Simone. Nina Simone, The Other Woman, vinyl, 1968.127 Or a theyfriend!128 Other times I overlooked questions that I should have asked, red flags I should have noticed, assumptions I let ride.The Pleasure of Deep, Intentional FriendshipA Conversation with Dani McClain and Jodie Tonita AMB.129 Woes!130 Being in relationship with y’all has been one of the great pleasures of my adult life. I spoke of it briefly in Emergent Strategy and, of course, had both of you in your own element/expertise in that book. For this book, I really want to focus on the pleasures of interdependence as it shows up in our love. I am imagining us sitting on one of the beaches, sun everywhere, reflecting on our lives. First, can you tell readers how we became woes? What was your journey into this intentional coevolution through friendship?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  For now, I wear clothes because I enjoy fashion and to get warm during colder parts of the year. But as I get older, it’s hard to keep clothing on at home, and what I do wear needs to flow and not make a big deal against my skin or it can’t stay. I also feel this way about the company I keep—that I need people around me who can adapt, have a gentle bright presence, who make me feel free, creative … and beautiful in every aspect. And even though I have this hermit nature, I get down with people and love it. If I am forced to choose labels to describe the ways I move toward people, I say I am pansexual to express who I am attracted to and/or queer for how I relate to sex and the world. Pansexual means my desire is not limited by the biological sex, gender, or gender identity of a potential lover. I would add species, just in case new hot aliens arrive in my lifetime. So far, I have been most attracted to gender-fluid beings, particularly masculine women, effeminate men, and trans men. And I am queer, in the grandest sense of the word. I buck the norms in my sexual life and in the rest of my life. For instance, while I enjoy a solid dose of masculinity in my lovers, it only intrigues me if I can top, bottom, and sideways them, and if they can see the woman and the boy in me. I have tried on monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, and solitude. Nonmonogamy tends to suit me best, even if I am occasionally focused on one lover. A recent lover shared a framework with me called relationship anarchy, which is the most precise articulation I’ve come across so far of my approach to love and sex, basing connection in trust, freedom, change, and honest communication.5 So that’s the sex and relationship landscape … now, onto the drugs! Before I share my drug history, I want to say that I believe that most drugs should be legalized and that there should be safe spaces to use them. I have been privileged and fortunate to safely move through my explorations. Those who are currently incarcerated for getting medicine to people should be released and given opportunities to actually lead in their industry. I have been an active drug user since my sophomore year of college, when I first smoked weed. I have smoked, vaped, salved, and eaten cannabis products since that fateful day and really enjoy the moderation I have been slowly growing, as well as the cultural shift toward legalization that is sweeping the United States.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Now I try to treat myself and my heart with the utmost care. I enter into romantic and intimate situations with careful awareness and regularly check my reality with people who I trust to be able to see reality clearly and tell me the truth. I take my time and get to know people on an emotional and spiritual level before entering into deeper levels of intimacy with them. I no longer engage in acts that make me feel disembodied or devalued. I am learning how sexuality can be a sacred act, part of a healthy sharing of two realities, and how desire can emerge from care and love, instead of from objectification. It has been a long journey to be able to build dignity, self-respect, and a capacity for intimacy, and I have a long journey ahead, but I feel more centered, grounded, honest, and happy than ever before in my life. Without a doubt, my artwork, political activism, writing, and teaching have deepened profoundly as a result of my new awareness. Now that I take significant time to sit with and understand my feelings, I find myself able to discern far more shades, combinations, and refractions of my inner life, and that nuance goes into my art/activist/theorist practice. I once believed that sex and romantic partnership were the most important things in life. I built up a false logic to justify that, but I also found much support for that thinking from both capitalist and radical communities. Today I believe that justice, honesty, kindness, community, and family (chosen and multispecies family included) outweigh the importance I place on fleeting desires. When Lorde says “having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing [the erotic’s] power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves,” I understand her use of the erotic as a grounds for the struggle for global justice for all beings, emerging out of the experience of true intimacy with myself, the world, and others, and accepting no less.81 Now I’m that girl who meditates every day, on my knees by my little statue of Guanyin, with my dog Roja nearby, who is learning what it means to be intimate with herself so she can be intimate with other people. I found more communities dedicated to liberation through the dharma, meditation, and social justice, which have helped me find more peace and self-love. I still have that Jem and the Holograms shirt. I still love hacking new worlds into existence. Now I love that earlier version of myself, and I can also hold her in compassion. I’m working on being a transformative educator, an artist engaged with my communities, and a good writer. I feel like I’m just starting to see other people’s eyes for the first time.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  So then it was only Florence and me. We walked quickly, because it was so cold, and Florence linked her hands around my arm and held me very close. When we reached the end of Quilter Street we stopped, as I had done on my first journey there, to gaze for a moment at the dark and eerie towers of Columbia Market, and to peer up at the starless, moonless, fog- and smoke-choked London sky. ‘I don’t believe Annie will catch us up, after all,’ murmured Florence, looking back towards Shoreditch. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe she will ...’ The house, when we entered it, seemed hot and stuffy enough; we soon grew chilled, however, once we had taken our coats off and visited the privy. Ralph had left my truckle-bed made up for me, and fixed a note to the mantel to say there was a pot of tea for us inside the oven. There was: it was as thick and brown as gravy, but we drank it anyway - carrying our mugs back into the parlour, where the air was warmest, and holding our hands before the last few glowing coals in the ashy hearth. The chairs had been pushed back to make room for my bed, so now, rather shyly, we sat upon it, side by side: as we did so, it moved a little on its castors, and Florence laughed. There was a lamp turned low upon the table but, apart from that, the room was very dim. We sat, and sipped our tea, and gazed at the coals: now and then the ash would shift a little in the grate, and the coal give a pop. ‘How still it seems,’ said Florence quietly, ‘after the Boy!’ I had drawn my knees to my chin - the bed was very low upon the rug - and now turned my cheek upon them, and smiled at her. ‘I’m glad you took me there,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had such a pleasant night since - well, I cannot say.’ ‘Can’t you?’ ‘I can’t. For half my pleasure, you know, was seeing you so gay...’ She smiled, then yawned. ‘Didn’t you think Miss Raymond very handsome?’ she asked me. ‘Pretty handsome.’ Not as handsome as you, I wanted to say, looking again at all the features I had once thought plain. Oh Flo, there’s no one as handsome as you! But I didn’t say it. And meanwhile, she had smiled. ‘I remember another girl Annie courted once. We let them stay with us, because Annie was sharing with her sister then. They slept in here, and Lilian and I were upstairs; and they were so noisy, Mrs Monks came round to ask, “Was someone poorly?” We had to say that Lily had the toothache - when in fact, she had slept through it all, with me beside her...’ Her voice grew quiet.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Benedict’s aim had been to create communities of obedience, stability, and religio (“reverence” and “bonding”) in a world of violence and uncertainty. The rule provided disciplina, similar to the military disciplina of the Roman soldier: it prescribed a series of physical rituals carefully designed to restructure emotion and desire and create an attitude of humility very different from the aggressive self-assertion of the knight. 16 Monastic disciplina set out to defeat not a physical enemy but the unruly psyche and the unseen powers of evil. The Carolingians knew that they owed their success in battle to highly disciplined troops. Hence they appreciated the Benedictine communities, and during the ninth and tenth centuries support for the rule became a central feature of government in Europe. 17 Monks formed a social order (ordo), separate from the disordered world outside the monastery. Abjuring sex, money, fighting, and mutability, the most corrupting aspects of secular life, they embraced chastity, poverty, nonviolence, and stability. Unlike the restless boskoi, Benedictine monks vowed to remain in the same community for life. 18 A monastery, however, was designed not so much to cater to individual spiritual quests but to serve a social function by providing occupation for the younger sons of the nobility, who could never hope to own land and might become a disruptive influence in society. At this point, Western Christendom did not distinguish public and private, natural and supernatural. Thus by combating the demonic powers with their prayers, monks were essential to the security of the realm. There were two ways for an aristocrat to serve God: fighting or praying. 19 Monks were the spiritual counterparts of secular soldiers, their battles just as real and far more significant: The abbot is armed with spiritual weapons and supported by a troop of monks anointed with the dew of heavenly graces. They fight together in the strength of Christ with the sword of the spirit against the aery wiles of the devils. They defend the king and clergy of the realm from the onslaughts of their invisible enemies. 20 The Carolingian aristocracy was convinced that the success of their earthly battles depended on their monks’ disciplined warfare, even though they fought only with “vigils, hymns, prayers, psalms, alms and daily offering of masses.” 21 Originally there had been three social orders in Western Christendom: monks, clerics, and the laity. But during the Carolingian period, two distinct aristocratic orders emerged: the warrior nobility (bellatores) and the men of religion (oratores). Clerics and bishops, who worked in the world (saeculum) and had once formed a separate ordo, were now merged with monks and would increasingly be pressured to live like them by abjuring marriage and fighting. In Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society, still influenced by ancient Aryan values, those who shed blood on the battlefield carried a taint that disqualified them from handling sacred things or saying Mass.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  To get more technical: drug use is a complex phenomenon. Using safely requires not only an understanding of the drug itself but also the circumstances under which you’re using. We call this DRUG, SET, and SETTING, a model of looking at the complexities of drug use, but it can also be used to think about other contexts, like having sex. It’s essentially looking at the type of drug or sex a person is having, their mind-set and health at that moment, and the environment in which the event is taking place. Harm reduction also aims to reduce stigmatization experienced by people who use drugs. Stigmatization is a process that involves severe social disapproval of a person’s characteristics or their beliefs considered to be unacceptable to dominant cultural norms. The outcomes of the process of stigmatization result in a series of diminishing returns that keep people on the outside. People who use drugs are among the most marginalized and criminalized people in society. But we reject stigmatization, we restore dignity and agency to people who use drugs, and effective harm reduction programs provide a sense of place, purpose, and participation. amb. What do you do for pleasure? Monique. My current favorite pleasure-receiving activity is to put my hands in the earth. I garden. I love to feel soil under my bare feet. It gives me immense pleasure to watch something grow that I planted. Our place in Oakland has the perfect little backyard where I’m cultivating a xeriscape full of succulents and other drought-tolerant plant life. I built a bamboo arbor and sit under it as often as I can, soaking in the sun and watching bees drift from flower to flower. It’s hypnotic. I have about three different books I’m reading now on Black feminism and the spirituality of Black women. I binge on shows like Black Mirror while waiting for the Queen of Dragons to return. I listen to podcasts like How to Survive the End of the World on Sunday mornings while I’m making miniatures—like Freamon in The Wire. I watch nail art videos (’cause: miniature art!). I love taking road trips with my partner—we’re exceptionally good travel companions. I get to spend time with people I love all around the country. I just came back from New Orleans, where I got to see people I deeply respect and am inspired by. I laugh from the gut often. Deep, belly-aching, loud-ass guffaws. My son and I like to text each other using memes only—those moments are often the highlight of my day—making me bust out laughing in the middle of my shared office space. And my partner is easily the funniest person I know. Laughing with him is like singing in a Baptist church choir. For real. amb. That sounds like a true abundance of pleasure, Monique. Is there anything else you want the readers to know?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  129 I am both interviewer [AMB] and one of the interviewees [amb] here.130 Woes are friends who are committed to Working on Excellence. This may be how you operate at all times or in all relationships, but in case you don’t, “woes” is a way to identify people with whom you have an increased accountability and responsibility for manifesting your best life. This term came to me via Drake.131 What y’all know about that Primal Astrology? See www.primalastrology.com.Principles in PracticeI am in multiple communities that put an emphasis on practice. In the Allied Media community, we have articulated principles that matter to us, and we have focused on how we embody those principles as a matter of practice. In the Generative Somatics and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity circles, we recognize that we are what we practice, and we become what we intentionally practice with our somas, our whole selves. As this book begins with pleasure principles, I would like to land the plane with practices that explicitly bring the principles to life, practices to root us in pleasure activism here and now, and in the future we are shaping. These are practices that make us pleasure activists not just in theory but also in the practices of our lives, awakening a pleasure politics that makes justice and liberation irresistible. Practices Attention liberation. Use meditation to learn to have agency with your attention, bringing it to breath, or sensation, or pain, or solution, or transformation.132 Practice pleasure in your own body and life. Notice what brings a yes to your lips, to your center. Make a pleasure journal. Put signs around your house to remind you of your pleasures. Please yourself, please others. Feel pleasure every day. Don’t let your body or your heart forget why we fight—to feel aliveness and togetherness. We will grow. Find the ease. There are aspects of this life that are an uphill battle, and we seem to still be on the ascending portion of that long arc bending toward justice. But we can sustain the struggle if we find all the ease available to us, the places where we can flow together, coast together, and rest.133 In organizing work, center pleasure as an organizing principle. This means feeding people great healthy local food that nourishes them when they come to a meeting and working together to meet the needs of the people in the space. Take the time to affirm the people and affirm the learning that sometimes masquerades as failure. Be unconditional in your commitment to movement, be transformational in every area of your life and work, and center pleasure and joy as resistance: laughter, dance, taking time for the relationships. When people find movements that meet their needs, welcome them whole, affirm them, commit to their transformation, and actually feel good, they stay, and movement grows. Set generative boundaries. And hold them. Only say yes when you mean it.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  together with commentary on it (called Gemara), developed in the 3rd–5th centuries A.D. 3. The Midrashim, collections of rabbinic interpretations of the Scriptures. III. The Mishnah A. The Philosophy of the Mishnah 1. The Mishnah is a collection of legal rulings (halakhot) for a time when there is no Temple, no visible place of divine presence, no story of God’s saving acts to tell. 2. God seems almost absent in the Mishnah, except that there is a connection between the Torah and the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) in the extraordinary chapter devoted to the sayings of the sages (Abot or Avot). 3. This is the underlying philosophy of the Mishnah: study and observance of Torah by Israel is the way God comes to earth. B. The Status of the Mishnah: Oral Torah 1. The question arises of the status of the Mishnah in relation to Scripture: the Mishnah is constantly spelling out how to obey Scriptural laws, yet seldom explicitly bases its views on quotations from, or interpretations of, Scripture. 2. The answer to this question is “the Judaism of the dual Torah” (i.e., rabbinic Judaism as we know it today) which acknowledges Scripture as written Torah, and Talmud as oral Torah, both of which were revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. IV. The Philosophy of Rabbinic Midrash: two examples A. “The sun also rises” (Midrash on Ecclesiastes 1:5) 1. A gloomy passage is taken out of context and interpreted as a piece of comfort. 2. But the allegory is not Platonic in style: it is not about timeless truths or essences, but about how God sustains Israel through history. 3. The focus of that sustenance—and thus of the rabbis’ interpretation—is the Torah and Israel’s study of it. 4. Hence the rabbinic interpretation is about the work of rabbinic interpretation (i.e., their leadership in Israel’s Torah study) as the means by which God sustains his people. B. “My children have defeated me!” (Babylonian Talmud) ©1999 The Teaching Company. 44

• From My People (2022)

  I was bothered by her story for many reasons, the chief of which was that I didn’t have any respect for any slaveholder, dead or not, and to me his word meant nothing. But my grandmother seemed perfectly satisfied that her explanation would be acceptable to the authorities, so for the time being I let the matter rest. Driving through the center of Leverton, I was reminded of the pictures on church fans in which a devout young white Christian family is shown walking hand in hand up a pebbled path to a little white church on a hill. The town was laid out in a perfect circle around a square that featured the most revered of its long-dead heroes, General Lever, posed in an oratorical gesture atop a pedestal overlooking gray pigeons and white spittoons. My grandmother had an easy acquaintance with all the townspeople, including the sheriff and the local politicians, who had all been patrons of my grandfather’s barbershop. Though polite, and probably in most cases decent enough to their wives, these men had the annoying habit of addressing every Negro, regardless of age, by his or her first name, so, whenever possible, I tried to avoid them. Farther along, we passed the Methodist church—a modest white edifice with four Doric columns on its porch. No Negro had ever seen the inside of it, not even to clean it, and doubtless none ever would. We passed a dead-end street that I had never seen before, and my grandmother told me that this was where the new City Building was. First, however, she wanted to go by the cemetery. I drove there, but as we came to the road that wound around it I saw that a deep washed-out gutter would make it impossible to reach the hedge border in the car. I stopped just short of the gutter, and my grandmother and I started to cross it on foot. She was already ahead of me, but she could not get across alone. I took her by the arm and, balancing myself against a fallen branch, boosted her forward, and in a moment we had gone in through the narrow entrance. Nothing had changed since my last visit there. A cloud of red dust from the disturbed hedges enveloped us and settled in our noses and on our clothes, and the high, decumbent grass made our legs and arms itch and sting. Through the growth, we made our way to my grandfather’s grave and found hardly a grain of sand out of its proper place. In the left-hand corner was a budding little tree, surrounded by neatly blocked hedges and green grass that looked like a carpet. The simple headstone that marked the grave was clean and white, and the mound of earth beneath it was neat and solid.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I save my fantasizing for when I’m alone. I wait till evening, take a couple of drinks, and curl up in bed with a sexy book. Then when the drinks take hold I can imagine my hands are those of my lover. Other fantasies are just daydreams, which I have constantly. My favorite daydream is of me cooking or washing dishes, my lover comes in, puts his arms around me, and as we kiss and press against one another and our passion builds, I just reach behind me and turn off the stove, the dishes are forgotten, everything left wonderfully unfinished in this very interrupted state, as we go off to the bedroom to make love. [Interview] MASTURBATIONNot all idle minds drift to sexual fantasy, as not all sexual fantasy (and idle hands) leads to masturbation. In fact, it’s the old chicken-and-the-egg routine. Fantasy and masturbation: which comes first? But one thing seems certain: that masturbation without fantasy is unlikely, unhappy, unreal. Masturbation doesn’t just require fantasy, it demands it. Without fantasy, masturbation would be too lonely. I don’t even want to think about it. In my researches I didn’t find one woman who said she had never masturbated. You could say that this has something to do with the nature of my subject, that the kind of people who talked to me were bound to be more sexually candid. Perhaps my surprise at finding that all the women I talked to masturbated is more a comment on me than my contributors. Possibly. But you see, it wasn’t that I didn’t expect women to masturbate—to have tried it or stumbled upon it at some point in their lives—I simply didn’t think my own experience was all that universal. It goes back again to how little women know about one another, how inclined we are to feel isolated, different, not like the other girls, because we don’t know about other girls. We all know about men; they masturbate. Little boys and masturbation are a normal, even charming part of the women’s magazine stories as to how little boys are. I suppose that’s it; we’ve all read so much about it, about little boys discovering it, and being discovered. It’s charming. But women? We’re as hidden as our clitorises. By the time we’ve found them, hidden away up there, we’re guilty at having located them. If it were meant to be found and enjoyed, wouldn’t it be in the open, hanging down and swinging free like a cock? (No wonder little girls suffer penis envy.)

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I don’t pretend to know what makes people work, but I’d be willing to bet that if more people were more open and let themselves go during sex, their brains as well as their bodies, the world would be a better place. I doubt that so many people would be so aggressive and power-crazy if they found a suitable sex partner who would accept all of them. If people could free themselves of deep-rooted sex guilts they’d spend more time becoming good lovers and wouldn’t have so much time for revenge and wars. Good sex makes my husband and me very mellow. Who would think of hating and fighting and plotting to get someone else if they’d just been very sexually satisfied… no matter what means they employed to reach that happy goal? Not many, I’ll bet. So I’m ending up defending my “dirty” thoughts! Believing in them, I guess is what I mean. [Letter] LilI only fantasize when I masturbate, and I suppose what I think about is typical. I imagine it is a man making love to me, that he kisses me passionately all over my body, concentrating most of his ardor on my cunt, teasing the outer lips, loving me totally and expertly. I simply lie there in ecstasy, which makes me feel a little guilty later at having such a selfish fantasy, since I never even imagine touching him. [Letter] AlisonWhen I was fourteen, I had the usual relationship with a close girlfriend (I think most girls have them). In my bedroom she would pretend to be the madam of a house and I would be a virgin girl. She would dress me in a sort of sexy bikini made of chiffon scarves. She would then be the customer, a rowdy seaman who would take me against my will. She would lie on me and rub her vagina against mine. I experienced very intense orgasms (more intense than from any man). After she moved away I never had the chance of another relationship like ours. Now when I masturbate I usually think that I am being seduced by a pretty female. However, if it ever should occur again in reality, I would need to be seduced by the woman in order to control my embarrassment.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Speaking our fantasies out naturally decreases the novelty of the particular situation to some extent. But we have discarded few, if any, of our fantasies. Actually, we have experienced many of our best fantasies, but even so, they remain effective sex stimulators. The most effective, the favorite, and the one which has withstood the test, is the one concerned with bestiality. It began about twenty years ago, and became a reality about three years ago. Our present dog is the third one, and he should be good for five or six years. The first two were German Shepherds, and we have trained all of them. Until the kids went away to college, dog-screwing was mostly reserved for special occasions, although I had cunnilingus often. I kept the dogs satisfied with masturbation and, when Bill was there to help guard against being surprised, I would fellatiate them. I know this may sound terrible, but it is really very pleasant, especially as I always thoroughly bathe that area with a nonirritating alcohol antiseptic which can be had in any drugstore. Precautions are unnecessary now, but I still enjoy giving him a suck sometimes. I hope that none of what I have written has been offensive. Please use it in any way you wish, if it has any value. [Letter] PosieI am forty-seven years old and have only been married to my present husband for two and a half years. I was previously married for twenty-four years; he was a violent man and sex with him was something hateful. But my new husband is a very good and kind lover who has taught me that sex is a wonderful thing to be enjoyed. I find with him that talking about our fantasies makes them even more exciting when they happen again. What I always like to imagine during sex with my husband is that I’m doing it with someone who doesn’t belong to me. This “someone else” is no one in particular, and not always a man. Far from being jealous or angry, my lover tells me to talk to him and explain in detail things that go on in my mind, and it makes our lovemaking fantastic. One of the favorite devices in my fantasy is to think that someone is watching me, and it becomes so real that it is this that heightens my climax. I do have lesbian fantasies, which really aren’t great, as I’m a man’s woman, but sometimes I do wonder how I would react to seeing another woman feeling her breasts and cunt, actually manipulating herself. I don’t want to be doing it, I just want to watch her. We often indulge in fantasies together, acting out little plays as though we had just met and he has never had a woman before. I seduce him, teach him what to do. Or we switch the roles around and he becomes the instructor. Either way it’s enjoyable. [Letter]

• From The Art of Memoir

  automatically? You’ll have to read the book to find out, for Conroy manages to make even the most quotidian event mean. Nobody’s rendered a teen’s cynical morning haste any better. And the rhythm of the paragraph: the long sentence—three lines—followed by a short sentence—two—leads up to three perfunctory words “End of breakfast.” This is an outlaw boy scrabbling for small sustenance, and the authority of the fat fridge door and his seminal voice—in the context of the rest of the book—lines up with Conroy’s cool, I-can- take-being-neglected persona. So powerful is Conroy’s voice that—at the zenith of his powers—he’s able to sexualize the throwing of a yoyo: That it was vaguely masturbatory seems inescapable. I doubt that half the pubescent boys in America could have been captured by any other means. . . . A single Loop-the-Loop might represent, in some mysterious way, the act of masturbation, but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw, trick, and return representing erection, climax, and detumescence seems immoderate. Conroy puts himself into a trance practicing the yoyo, thus disassociating from his family’s profound lack of care. Finding that “cool” spot—in the old hep-cat jazz sense of finding a groove— means finding order, silence, a place where time can stop. In such instants of cool, the boy-in-pain Conroy can vanish. He’ll later find sex and music and liquor and driving too fast as other modes of escape into selfless silence. Having taught Conroy’s Stop-Time for some thirty years, I can testify that students seem to trust this voice. They believe it—that it won’t lie or mislead, fabricate events or pander, confess the lesser sin to hide the greater, bore or beg for pity. Ergo, in literary terms, it sounds true. Again: voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character. Just as a memoirist’s nature bestows her magic powers on the page, we also wind up seeing how selfish or mean-spirited or divisive she is or was. We don’t see events objectively; we perceive them through ourselves. And we remember through a filter of both who we are now and who we once were.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  EXPLORATIONThe next three fantasies are from women who are sexually happy in their beds. At least they say they are, and I’m prepared to accept what a woman tells me about her sex life. The alternative is to say that because each of these women fantasizes beyond what is actually happening, it follows that the real sex is inadequate and she dissatisfied. But that would be playing more than amateur psychiatrist, it would be playing God. No thank you. For many women, fantasy is a way of exploring, safely, all the ideas and actions which might frighten them in reality. In fantasy they can expand their reality, play out certain sexual variables and images in much the same way that children enter into fantasy as a form of play, of trying out desires, releasing energies for which they have no outlet in reality. Thinking about it, even getting excited over the image, doesn’t mean you want it as your reality… or else we all, night dreamers that we are, would be suppressed robbers, bisexuals, murderers, or even inanimate objects. KarenI have this fantasy quite often while Ben is fucking me. In fact, I’d say I have it during our best sessions, when my body is most relaxed and inventive. Ben gets so excited when I’m into this fantasy it’s as though he were having it too. Yet I know if it were to really happen it would scare the hell out of him—and out of me. I don’t think we have any room in our lives for any kind of group scene; it simply wouldn’t fit in; we wouldn’t know how to handle it. But in fantasy, it’s fantastic.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Every thing being settled, and it being a fine summer day, but rather of the warmest, we set out after dinner, and got to our rendezvous about four in the afternoon; where, landing at the foot of a neat, joyous pavilion, Emily and I were handed into it by our esquires, and there drank tea with a cheerfulness and gaiety, that the beauty of the prospect, the serenity of the weather, and the tender politeness of our sprightly gallants, naturally led us into. After tea, and taking a turn in the garden, my particular, who was the master of the house, and had in no sense schemed this party of pleasure for a dry one, proposed to us, with that frankness which his familiarity at Mrs. Cole’s entitled him to, as the weather was excessively hot, to bathe together, under a commodious shelter that he had prepared expressly for that purpose, in a creek of the river, with which a side-door of the pavilion immediately communicated, and where we might be sure of having our diversion out, safe from interruption, and with the utmost privacy. Emily, who never refused anything, and I, who ever delighted in bathing, and had no exception to the person who proposed it, or to those pleasure it was easy to guess it implied, took care, on this occasion, not to wrong our training at Mrs. Cole’s, and agreed to it with as good a grace as we could. Upon which, without loss of time, we returned instantly to the pavilion, one door of which opened into a tent, pitched before it, that with its marquise, formed a pleasing defense again the sun, or the weather, and was besides as private as we could wish. The lining of it, embossed cloth, represented a wild forest foliage, from the top, down to the sides, which, in the same stuff, were figured with fluted pilasters, with their spaces between filled with flower vases, the whole having a pay effect croon the eye, wherever you turned it. Then it reached sufficiently into the water, yet contained convenient benches round it, on the dry ground, either to keep our clothes, or..., or..., in short for more uses than resting upon. There was a side-table too, loaded with sweetmeats, jellies, and other eatables, and bottles of wine and cordials, by way of occasional relief from any rawness, or chill of the water, or from any faintness from whatever cause; and in fact, my gallant, who understood chère entiêre perfectly, and who, for taste (even if you would not approve this specimen of it) might have been comptroller of pleasures to a Roman emperor, had left no requisite towards convenience or luxury unprovided.

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

  25. The love of God is itself a gift of God. To these chapters the synod added a Creed of anthropology and soteriology, which, in opposition to Semi-Pelagianism, contains the following five propositions:1891 1. Through the fall free will has been so weakened, that without prevenient grace no one can love God, believe on Him, or do good for God’s sake, as he ought (sicut oportuit, implying that he may in a certain measure). 2. Through the grace of God all may, by the co-operation of God, perform what is necessary for their soul’s salvation. 3. It is by no means our faith, that any have been predestinated by God to sin (ad malum), but rather: if there are people who believe so vile a thing, we condemn them with utter abhorrence (cum omni detestatione).1892 4. In every good work the beginning proceeds not, from us, but God inspires in us faith and love to Him without merit precedent on our part, so that we desire baptism, and after baptism can, with His help, fulfil His will. 5. Because this doctrine of the fathers and the synod is also salutary for the laity, the distinguished men of the laity also, who have been present at this solemn assembly, shall subscribe these acts. In pursuance of this requisition, besides the bishops, the Praefectus praetorio Liberius, and seven other viri illustres, signed the Acts. This recognition of the lay element, in view of the hierarchical bent of the age, is significant, and indicates an inward connection of evangelical doctrine with the idea of the universal priesthood. And they were two laymen, we must remember, Prosper and Hilarius, who first came forward in Gaul in energetic opposition to Semi-Pelagianism and in advocacy of the sovereignty of divine grace. The decisions of the council were sent by Caesarius to Rome, and were confirmed by pope Boniface II. in 530. Boniface, in giving his approval, emphasized the declaration, that even the beginning of a good will and of faith is a gift of prevenient grace, while Semi-Pelagianism left open a way to Christ without grace from God. And beyond question, the church was fully warranted in affirming the pre-eminence of grace over freedom, and the necessity and importance of the gratia praeveniens. Notwithstanding this rejection of the Semi-Pelagian teachings (not teachers), they made their way into the church again, and while Augustine was universally honored as a canonized saint and standard teacher, Cassian and Faustus of Rhegium remained in grateful remembrance as saints in France.1893

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Mrs. Cole still continued her friendship, and offered me her assistance and advice towards another choice; but I was now in ease and affluence enough to look about me at leisure; and as to any constitutional calls of pleasure, their pressure, or sensibility, was greatly lessened by a consciousness of the ease with which they were to be satisfied at Mrs. Cole’s house, where Louisa and Emily still continued in the old way; and my great favourite Harriet used often to come and see me, and entertain me, with her head and heart full of the happiness she enjoyed with her dear baronet, whom she loved with a tenderness and constancy, even though he was her keeper, and what is yet more, had made her independent, by a handsome provision for her and hers. I was then in this vacancy from any regular employ of my person in my way of business, when one day, Mrs. Cole, in the course of the constant confidence we lived in, acquainted me that there was one Mr. Barville, who used her house, just come to town, whom she was not a little perplexed about providing a suitable companion for; which was indeed a point of difficulty, as he was under the tyranny of a cruel taste: that of an ardent desire, not only of being unmercifully whipped himself, but of whipping others, in such sort, that though he paid extravagantly those who had the courage and complaisance to submit to his humour, there were few, delicate as he was in the choice of his subjects, who would exchange turns with him so terribly at the expense of their skin. But, what yet increased the oddity of this strange fancy was the gentleman being young; whereas it generally attacks, it seems, such as are, through age, obliged to have recourse to this experiment, for quickening the circulation of their sluggish juices, and determining a conflux of the spirits of pleasure towards those flagging shrivelly parts, that rise to life only by virtue of those titillating ardours created by the discipline of their opposites, with which they have so surprising a consent.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FJ.jpg] 1The jury summons came in late spring. There’s an optimism to bringing in the mail—a small, dinky optimism, but I like it. It’s reliable. Leaning against the kitchen counter, I spread out my loot. Wedged between the electric bill and a glossy sheaf of coupons is the jury summons. It’s a white trifold, stapled, with block letters announcing its contents. I split the staple from the paper with my thumb. There’s a rhythmic thump behind me, probably June trying to liberate the bin of toys we keep wedged under the sideboard. The afternoons are stretching toward summer now, but the countertop is still cold under my elbows, the way cotton bedsheets are when you first climb in. The summons reads, TUESDAY, 8:30 A.M. We have a babysitter every Tuesday until five, and Brandon will be at the new restaurant site all day, supervising the buildout. If I’ve got to have jury duty, I guess a Tuesday’s not bad. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The courthouse peers down a sloping grid of streets toward Puget Sound. I ride the elevator up and give my name to a woman in shoulder pads at the reception desk. There are already a few dozen people seated in the assembly room, recipients of the same summons. We wait. I don’t mind; I’ve brought my laptop and a magazine. I don’t want to wind up on a jury, but being stuck in this room presents the pleasant constraints of an airplane in mid-flight: there’s nowhere to go and nothing else to do, so I might as well work. The receptionist begins to read names, and mine comes halfway down the page-long list. I stand and join the crowd that’s collecting in the entryway, where another woman appears, announcing herself as the bailiff. She hands us each a numbered sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve. We’ll be going into the courtroom shortly, and we’re to follow her to the seats in back. We follow her like ducklings, around a wall behind the judge’s bench and into a fluorescent-lit courtroom. I’m pleased that it looks like all the ones on TV, though it’s missing Sam Waterston. The judge has short feathered hair and wears black robes and a pair of drugstore reading glasses, over which she watches us enter. She gives off the aura of a successful real estate agent from the 1980s, a childhood friend’s mom who served Lean Cuisine every weeknight without apology. There’s a female prosecutor and two attorneys on the defense’s side. The bailiff leads us past them, through a wooden gate, to our seats.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Even then, the tail looped over the edge and burnt. It was the meatiest fish we ate that night, with the greatest proportion of white flesh to spiky bones. Lecia and I ate it while he worked up a skillet full of thin-sliced red potatoes along with Vidalia onions he’d quartered. I can still see Daddy scraping at those potatoes, which would keep the smoky fish taste from the lard. He was singing “Goodnight Irene” under his breath, staring into the skillet with that faraway look. Watching the sky arch above us through pines, I thought about a passage I’d read in the encyclopedias Grandma bought us, how the Rockies were formed by glaciers sliding across the continent to rake up zillions of tons of rock. I pictured one moving slow as white silk across where we sat. Maybe God dropped that boulder off right there , I wrote in my diary the next day, for us to cook on. (Comfort makes fools of us that way, and a kid gets faith back quick.) At one point Daddy said to hush, and through the far pines, lit by a three-quarter moon, we made out the blunted antlers of a moose, which struck me as noble in its bigjawed ugliness. It chewed in profile slow as a ballplayer. Sometime later, a bobcat even yowled, close enough to make me scoot up under Daddy’s arm, which fear made him laugh and say nothing was going to bother me. And I believed him. After we ate, Daddy stoked the fire again. He lay back on a jeans jacket he’d balled up and sipped at a silver whiskey flask. Lecia and I undid a couple of wire coat hangers for marshmallows. I roasted three at a time, dipping them right in the fire. They blazed and cooked black outside, but inside were nothing but goo. Lecia was more even in approach: she toasted them singly to a pale gold color. She even bent one end of the hanger, so it had a rotary handle she could turn like an honest-to-God spit. For once that difference struck me okay without sinking me into a swamp of worry about how it might augur about my character, or lack of character. She even told me while she sat twisting her spit that mine was one helluva fish, and Daddy agreed. We fell asleep beside him on that unlikely cold stone, both full as ticks on fish and potatoes, each snuggled under an armpit, our heads on his chest. He still smelled of horse. A few times some coal crumbling in on itself caused me to jerk awake; then I saw sparks surge up in a tower and felt Daddy draw our football jackets up over our shoulders. Otherwise, he lay still, the flask balanced on his breast bone at the perfect angle so he could sip steady without lifting his head or spilling down his chin.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The plea of love then over-ruling all objections, for him, which he could not but read the sincerity of in a heart ever open to him, obliged me to receive his hand, by which means I was in pass, among other innumerable blessings, to bestow a legal parentage on those fine children you have seen by this happiest of matches. Thus, at length, I got snug into port, where, in the bosom of virtue, I gathered the only uncorrupt sweets: where, looking back on the course of vice I had run, and comparing its infamous blandishments with the infinitely superior joys of innocence, I could not help pitying, even in point of taste, those who, immersed in gross sensuality, are insensible to the so delicate charms of VIRTUE, than which even PLEASURE has not a greater friend, nor VICE a greater enemy. Thus temperance makes men lords over those pleasures that intemperance enslaves them to: the one, parent of health, vigour fertility cheerfulness, and every other desirable good of life; the other, of diseases, debility, barrenness, self-loathing, with only every evil incident to human nature. You laugh, perhaps, at this tail-piece of morality, extracted from me by the force of truth, resulting from compared experiences: you think it, no doubt, out of character; possibly too you may look on it as the paultry finesse of one who seeks to mask a devotee to vice under a rag of a veil, impudently smuggled from the shrine of Virtue: just as if one was to fancy one’s self completely disguised at a masquerade, with no other change of dress than turning one’s shoes into slippers; or, as if a writer should think to shield a treasonable libel, by concluding it with a formal prayer for the King. But, independent of my flattering myself that you have a juster opinion of my sense and sincerity, give me leave to represent to you, that such a supposition is even more injurious to Virtue than to me: since, consistently with candour and good nature, it san have no foundation but in the falsest of fears, that its pleasures cannot stand in comparison with those of Vice; but let truth dare to hold it up in its most alluring light: then mark, how spurious, how low of taste, how comparatively inferior its joys are to those which Virtue gives sanction to, and whose sentiments are not above making even a sauce for the senses, but a sauce of the highest relish; whilst Vices are the harpies that infect and foul the feast. The paths of Vice are sometimes strewed with roses, but then they are for ever infamous for many a thorn, for many a cankerworm: those of Virtue are strewed with roses purely, and those eternally unfading ones.