Desire

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 Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  People will grasp greedily at such things because they are considered so impossible. By the law of induction we can imagine all of these shortcuts and fantasies (just as we can imagine a unicorn), which gives us the desire to reach them, and imagining them is almost like experiencing them. Remember: it is not possession but desire that secretly impels people. To possess something inevitably brings about some disappointment and sparks the desire for something new to pursue. You are preying upon the human need for fantasies and the pleasures of chasing after them. In this sense your efforts must be continually renewed. Once people get what they want or possess you, your value and their respect for you immediately begin to lower. Keep withdrawing, surprising, and stimulating the chase. As long as you do, you have the power. The Supreme Desire Our path must always be toward greater awareness of our nature. We must see within ourselves the grass-is-always-greener syndrome at work and how it continually impels us to certain actions. We need to be able to distinguish between what is positive and productive in our covetous tendencies and what is negative and counterproductive. On the positive side, feeling restless and discontented can motivate us to search for something better and to not settle for what we have. It enlarges our imagination as we consider other possibilities instead of the circumstances we face. As we get older, we tend to become more complacent, and renewing the restlessness of our earlier years can keep us youthful and our minds active. This restlessness, however, must be under conscious control. Often our discontent is merely chronic; our desire for change is vague and a reflection of our boredom. This leads to a waste of precious time. We are unhappy with the way our career is going and so we make a big change, which requires learning new skills and acquiring new contacts. We enjoy the newness of it all. But several years later we again feel the stirring of discontent. This new path isn’t right either. We would have been better off thinking about this more deeply, homing in on those aspects of our previous career that did not click and trying for a more gentle change, choosing a line of work related to the previous one but requiring an adaptation of our skills. With relationships, we can spend our life searching for the perfect man or woman and end up largely alone.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “We weren’t,” we say in unison. Elizabeth is willing to fall in love with him, too, but she needs to see him first, as a formality. We agree to meet after class at the fountain, in case he comes back for another drink. We go out and tell the nurse we’re better. She sends Elizabeth back to home-ec but makes me go lie down again. “You’re still pale,” she says shortly. He doesn’t show up at the drinking fountain again, but after school we go to my house to pore over last year’s yearbook. I have a feeling he’s older than us, and it’s true. We find him among last year’s eighth-graders. “Jeff Bach,” I announce, and hand the yearbook over. We’re in my living room eating Fritos and drinking pop. My sister hasn’t gotten home from high school yet so we’re safe, nobody’s bugging us. “He’s got blond hair,” she remarks, staring at the picture closely. She takes another handful of Fritos. “I thought you said he looked like a Beatle.” She puts them in her mouth. “I said he’s as cute as a Beatle,” I reply. “Not that he was a Beatle.” She stares at his face intently as she chews, and then comes to a conclusion. “Let’s face it,” she proclaims, “he’s cuter than a Beatle.” We’re both in love with Jeff Bach, ninth-grader extraordinaire. The back door slams and my sister appears in the doorway to the living room. She is wearing a granny dress, her thick brown hair tucked into a crocheted snood at the nape of her neck. She arches her brows. “How’s kindergarten?” she asks. She takes the bag of Fritos from Elizabeth’s lap and heads upstairs with it. “Clean this house up,” she says as she rounds the curve at the landing. We leave and walk over to Elizabeth’s house, where we tell Jinn about our new boyfriend. We get Elizabeth’s yearbook and make her look at the picture. “Blond,” she says politely, and turns her eyes back to the television. Pretty soon Elizabeth’s stepdad comes home from work. We show him the picture. “How would you like it if I married this guy?” Elizabeth asks him rhetorically. He says he’d like it just fine and asks why the newspaper hasn’t come yet. “Who knows, that’s why,” Elizabeth replies. I get killed if I’m not there when my mother gets home from work, so I leave and call up Elizabeth ten minutes later from two blocks over. “What’re you doing?” I ask. There are four girls in our group, plus two best friends who hang around with another group approximately half the time. Besides Elizabeth and me there are Madelyn and Renee, and the two best friends, Carol and Janet. Renee is the oldest of six kids and we stay overnight at her house a lot because both her parents work nights at the post office and leave Renee in charge.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  2 John 3:16.3 John 15:13.4 Song of Songs 6:3.5 1 Corinthians 7:3–4.6 1 Corinthians 4:21; John 15:13; Romans 13:10; 1 John 4:7; Ephesians 2:4.7 Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark has a section on agape that is stunning. A classic book on agape is C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.8 Romans 5:8.9 1 Corinthians 1:26.10 Jeremiah 1:4–5.11 John 15:16.12 Theologians call this “escatalogical realism.”13 When Jesus is tempted in the wilderness (Matt. 4), the tempter begins, “If you are the Son of God . . .” And yet several verses earlier, at Jesus’s baptism, the voice from heaven had just declared, “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.”14 There’s a poem in the Bible called the Song of Songs, in which the woman says that she wants the man to “kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—for your love is more delightful than wine” (1:2). She tells him, “Take me away with you” (1:4). She says she’s “faint with love” (2:5).She is sexually alive, full of longing, expressing herself, full of desire—this is a woman with no hangups. And yet she says something fascinating later on in the poem. She says, “But my own vineyard is mine to give” (8:12). Why is this significant? Because in the ancient Near East, a vineyard is a metaphor for sexuality. She’s not going to give herself away to just anybody. It’s her decision, and she will make it without coercion or manipulation. She’s alive sexually, and yet it doesn’t control her. And how does the man respond? He tells her, “You are a garden locked up . . . you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain” (4:12). “You are a garden fountain, a well of flowing water” (4:15). Why all of this talk about water? Because it’s a symbol of life and vitality and energy and purity. He’s praising her for her control of her sexuality. He isn’t pressuring her, piling on the guilt because she’s so tight, making her feel like she’s repressed. He’s thrilled that she doesn’t give herself to just anyone. So here are these two people who are totally alive sexually and who can talk about it, who can express themselves to each other openly and honestly, and yet they aren’t at the mercy of their urges. They’re able to live on some higher plane. There is something guiding them that’s deeper and stronger than just their sexual urges.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  morocco (1986) Bicycle past police lights twisting the blue from the night, past a man setting a box on fire to make a pot of tea. Lean forward enough and it’s as if you’re floating, as if there’s no machine supporting you, the earth spinning an inch below your feet. Blur your eyes and sing a little song to yourself to keep upright—the song keyed to the rhythm of pedaling. Skim over the dark earth, arms spread, the sign of the cross, Look, Ma, no hands , crucified by the air, crucified by the night. Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float? After considerable struggle I managed to get the boat on land, then I flew to Amsterdam to meet Emily, who’d been traveling Europe for a couple months already. I needed to get away from the shelter for a winter—the last night at work I’d been scratched in the face by one of the psychotic guests that I had such a good rapport with. He drew blood, just a drop. Within a month Emily and I find an apartment in Paris, and I find a typewriter in the closet, set myself up to look like a writer. The sublet turns out to be somewhat illegal, the former tenant trying to make some money by passing us the key. Within two weeks the landlord discovers us and wants us out. But we’d paid two months up front and so we stay, even after the heat and electricity are shut off—eating by candlelight, collecting boxes to burn in the fireplace. When it’s time to go, Emily flies back to America and I drift south, to Salamanca, then Lisbon, then farther, taking a boat to Tangier. I don’t plan to stay long, to get high or buy drugs, but by midnight of my first day I’m stumbling through a medieval maze back to my hotel room in Chefchouen, trying to conceal fifty grams of unprocessed hashish under my t-shirt, a grapefruit-sized ball of bright green pollen. In Morocco I learn to buy cigarettes, to split one open by licking the side, to empty the tobacco onto my open palm, to break off a chunk of hash and balance it in the center, to take a lighter to it until it softens, to blend it all together and roll it into a very heavy joint and smoke it before getting out of bed in the morning. One and you’re ambulatory, it dulls the knife edge of the day. Glide into the market, you can still talk when you’re high, you can always look. Pointy yellow slippers. A multicolored hat. The hashish dulls and simultaneously focuses, reduces the day to a pinpoint, to a voice inside laughing, a board strapped to your back to keep you standing—all you are now is high. Two joints and the doors close, you don’t have to go out today. Who would you see if you did? I’m reading Duras and Bowles and Beckett—dark, absurd, strangely comforting. I’ve been working in the shelter for a couple years, I want to see how close to the edge I can come without falling. Two weeks later I find myself in an alley in a town called Mogador, buying opium from Mohammed and his friend. Just a little. The alley dead-ends at a wall. Mohammed unfolds a knife to shave off a gram ( what kind of opium needs a knife to cut it? ), then he turns this knife ( goddammit, why is there always a knife? ) toward me, touches my chest with the blade, asks softly if I’m sure I don’t have any more money on me, just a little. I’ve already been punched by police in Lisbon for taking a photograph of the wrong people. In a few days the police in Mogador will pick me up for speaking with a veiled woman. I’ll have to spend a day in jail while they decided my fate, the hashish and the opium back in my hotel room, in the drawer with my passport. By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn’t a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place. The way he watched me back there in the field, when we worked briefly, side by side, our arms brushing against each other as the plants racked themselves in a green blur before me, his eyes lingering, then flitting away when I caught them. I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped. “My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?” Trevor and I talked about the fields as the light slipped from the barn, how much more there was to be done, how the crop was for cigars exported to Africa and East Asia, where smoking was still popular and where anything that came from America still had an aura of promise to it. But truth was, Trevor said, the crop was low-grade, the burn bitter in the throat, sour. “This crop ain’t even legit,” he said. His voice echoed up the rafters. I peered over my shoulder, catching him. “Wormholes all over ’em. We got two good years, maybe three, and then—” He ran his hand, like a blade, over his Adam’s apple. “It’s a wrap.” He grew silent. I could feel his eyes as I returned to my bike. And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of. As I laid my chain on the fulcrum, I could hear the swooshing of the Gatorade in the bottle, then the bottle being set down on the bench. After a moment, he said, real quiet, “I fucking hate my dad.” Up until then I didn’t think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them. “I hate my dad, too,” I said to my hands, now still and dark with chain grease.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  What Stephanie fails to see is that behind Warren’s nagging insistence is a yearning to be intimate with his wife. For him, sex is a prelude to intimacy, a pathway to emotional vulnerability. She responds to him as if he were one more needy child. She doesn’t realize that this is not just for him but for her, too. Like a lot of women, once she’s in the caretaking mode she has a hard time switching it off. She’s so mentally organized in terms of what she does for everyone else that she is unable to recognize when something is offered to her. What Warren finds intolerable is that his approach is having the opposite effect of what he intends. He is desperate for a flicker of desire from Stephanie, but he wants it just to be there, sudden and whole, the way it is for him. I explain to him that expecting our partner to be in the mood just because we are is a setup for disappointment. We take lack of desire as a personal rejection, and forget that one of the great elixirs of passion is anticipation. You can’t force desire, but you can create an atmosphere where desire might unfurl. You can listen, invite, tease, kiss. You can tempt, compliment, romance, and seduce. All these tactics help to compose an erotic substratum from which your partner can more easily be lifted. Even before Stephanie had children, her sexuality was always more receptive than initiating, and she rarely experienced spontaneous desire. In those days, Warren’s role was lavishly complementary: her coyness was dissipated by his assertiveness. He not only made her feel desired and desirable; he also made her feel desirous. He would entice her slowly, gradually awakening her senses, and she would eagerly respond. This responsiveness, so marked in the early days of their courtship, temporarily masked her characteristic lack of sexual agency (a trait shared by many women). I point out to him that she might be more receptive today if he paid attention to cultivating her desire rather than simply monitoring it. For Stephanie, love and desire are inseparable. She needs to feel intimate before she can allow the vulnerability of sex; otherwise, she feels objectified. “Sometimes it feels like he just wants a release. It has nothing to do with me,” she says. “It’s a total turn-off.” “Stephanie needs you to take the lead, but you can’t just buy her a ticket; you have to get her interested in the trip,” I tell Warren. “You play an important role as the keeper of the flame. Right now, all she feels is pressure. She experiences your come-ons as abrupt and intrusive. She thinks all you want is sex. Prove to her it’s not.” Looking for Stephanie

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  developing the rebelliousness herself, she looks to externalize it in the form of the rebellious male. If she senses a man might be like this, based on his appearance, she will project fantasies that are charged and sexual. Oftentimes she chooses a man who is relatively young because this makes him less threatening, less of a patriarch. But his youth and immaturity make it almost impossible to form a stable relationship, and her angry side will come out as she grows disenchanted. Once a woman recognizes she is prone to this projection, she must come to terms with a simple fact: what she really wants is to develop the independence, assertiveness, and power to disobey in herself. It is never too late to do so, but these qualities must be built up and developed in small steps, everyday challenges in which she practices saying no, breaking some rules, et cetera. Becoming more assertive, she can begin to have relationships that are more equal and satisfying. The Fallen Woman: To the man in question, the woman who fascinates him seems so different from those he has known. Perhaps she comes from a different culture or social class. Perhaps she is not as educated as he is. There might be something dubious about her character and her past; she is certainly less physically restrained than most women. He thinks she’s earthy. She seems to be in need of protection, education, and money. He will be the one to rescue and elevate her. But somehow the closer he gets to her, the less it turns out as he had expected. In Swann’s Way , volume 1 of the novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, the protagonist, Charles Swann—based on a real person—is an aesthete, a connoisseur of art. He is also a Don Juan who is deathly afraid of any relationship or form of commitment. He has seduced many women of his class. But then he meets a woman named Odette, who is from a decidedly different social circle. She is uneducated, a bit vulgar, and some would say she is a courtesan. She intrigues him. Then one day, while staring at a reproduction of a biblical scene from a Botticelli fresco, he decides she resembles a woman in the painting. Now he is fascinated and begins to idealize her. Odette must have had a hard life, and she deserves better. Despite his fear of commitment, he will marry her and educate her in the finer things of life. What he doesn’t realize is that she does not at all resemble the woman he fantasizes about. She is extremely clever and strong willed, much stronger than he is. She will end up making him her passive slave, as she continues to have affairs with other men and women. Men of this type often had strong mother figures in their childhood. They became good, obedient boys, excellent students at school. Consciously they are attracted to well-educated women, to

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Lesbian Cult Classic You arrange to hang out at her house. You are going to watch The Brave Little Toaster , a movie you haven’t seen since childhood but that you remember loving and being terrified of. You sit inches from each other on a green velvet couch, drinks sweating on the coffee table. When your favorite number is on—the junkyard cars singing bleakly of their erstwhile lives, reminding you that they are now worthless and about to die—her index finger drifts against your hand, and you feel a clench of desire. You know this move. You’ve done this move a thousand times: I am too shy to turn to you and tell you what I want; instead, I will pretend that I am not quite in control of this single, nomadic digit. The movie ends, and you both sit there in the dark. You start to nervously chatter about trivia—“Did you know the story this movie is based on won a Nebula Award? It—” She kisses you. Upstairs, you both tumble onto her bed. She never kisses you in the same place twice. Then she says, “I’d like to take your shirt off. May I?” And you nod, and she does. She slides her hand around your bra clasp. “Is this all right?” she asks. The room smells like lavender, or maybe you just remember that because her comforter was lavender. Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?” and the thrill of saying yes, yes, is like the pulsing of the tide over your face, and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission. Dream House as Famous Last Words “We can fuck,” she says, “but we can’t fall in love.” 2 2 . Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales , Ballads , Myths , Fables , Mediaeval Romances , Exempla , Fabliaux , Jest-Books , and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958), Type T3, Omens in love affairs.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Practical Grandiosity Grandiosity is a form of primal energy we all possess. It impels us to want something more than we have, to be recognized and esteemed by others, and to feel connected to something larger. The problem is not with the energy itself, which can be used to fuel our ambitions, but with the direction it takes. Normally grandiosity makes us imagine we are greater and more superior than is actually the case. We can call this fantastical grandiosity because it is based on our fantasies and the skewed impression we get from any attention we receive. The other form, which we shall call practical grandiosity , is not easy to achieve and does not come naturally to us, but it can be the source of tremendous power and self-fulfillment. Practical grandiosity is based not on fantasy but on reality. The energy is channeled into our work and our desire to reach goals, to solve problems, or to improve relationships. It impels us to develop and hone our skills. Through our accomplishments we can feel greater. We attract attention through our work. The attention we receive in this way is gratifying and keeps us energized, but the greater sense of gratification comes from the work itself and from overcoming our own weaknesses. The desire for attention is under control and subordinate. Our self-esteem is raised, but it is tied to real achievements, not to nebulous, subjective fantasies. We feel our presence enlarged through our work, through what we contribute to society. Although the precise way to channel the energy will depend on your field and skill level, the following are five basic principles that are essential for attaining the high level of fulfillment that can come from this reality-based form of grandiosity. Come to terms with your grandiose needs. You need to begin from a position of honesty. You must admit to yourself that you do want to feel important and be the center of attention. This is natural. Yes, you want to feel superior. You have ambitions like everyone else. In the past, your grandiose needs may have led you into some bad decisions, which you can now acknowledge and analyze. Denial is your worst enemy. Only with this self-awareness can you begin to transform the energy into something practical and productive. Concentrate the energy. Fantastical grandiosity will make you flit from one fantastic idea to another, imagining all the accolades and attention you’ll receive but never realizing any of them. You must do the opposite.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Further, Paul’s opposition to law observance occurs in letters written to Gentiles who are tempted or being encouraged to adopt the Jewish law. While some may have hesitated to undergo the rite of circumcision, others seem to have positively desired to do so. Paul can speak of at least some of his readers in Galatia as “those who desire to be under the law” (οἱ ὑπὸ νόμον θέλοντες εἶναι, 4:21). For any of his Gentile readers who wanted to adopt the Jewish law in its entirety, Paul’s vehement opposition would not have sounded like universalism or inclusivism, but like exclusivism. As Pheme Perkins puts it, “Paul is as intolerant of the Gentile who assimilates to Jewish habits and religious practices as the sharp-tongued Roman satirists who make fun of such Judaizing.” 31 Further, if so many Paul scholars believe that any Jew who thinks that Gentiles need to convert to Judaism is not inclusive, or not inclusive enough, why do so many Paul scholars conclude that Paul or Christianity is inclusive. After al , Paul thought that Gentiles needed to abandon their gods and ethics and worship Israel’s God, as well as stipulating that they adhere to his gospel about Christ. In other words, why is requiring adherence to a rather difficult-to-believe message about a risen Christ more inclusive than requiring the removal of a piece of skin via the rite of circumcision? Clearly, there is no objective answer to these questions—inclusivity and exclusivity are values that exist only within the eye of the beholder.32 In other words, we modern scholars are injecting our own ideological, religious, and moral preferences into our purportedly historical work when we choose to narrate early Judaism and Christianity using the categories of exclusivism and inclusivism, respectively. In Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, Paula Fredriksen argues convincingly that the early Jesus movement gave birth to something new within early Judaism: a concerted, systematic outreach to Gentiles. 33 Whereas previously some Jews at least were open to Gentiles becoming Jews, and a few Jews sporadical y called Gentiles to do so, it was actual y Christ following Jews who first thought to missionize Gentiles in a systematic way. They did so, of course, because they were convinced that the eschaton had arrived—now was the time that God was redeeming the world and dealing with the Gentiles. And he was doing so in Messiah Jesus ( en Christō). All early Christ followers (or at least all the ones we know much about) believed this. Paul and his opponents agreed that God was now rescuing Gentiles, but they disagreed on the precise implications of this rescue mission 30 Jon D. Levenson, Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Library of Jewish Ideas; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 157.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Man vs. Nature In New York City you visit a store that sells natural and scientific ephemera. Deer skulls in cases, petrified wood, articulated bat skeletons in bell jars, amethyst geodes as tall as a child, taxidermied mice, trilobite fossils, leather-bound birding books. There is something hypnotic about this store. You wish you could spend all day there; you wish you could spend thousands of dollars there. It reminds you of a store you used to go to as a kid—Natural Wonders, RIP—and how it always made you feel like equal parts Ellie Sattler and Lara Croft. That night, lying next to her on a futon, you tell her about a fantasy you have: “We have a beautiful home; the sort of home that has its own library, filled with books and the sort of things an amateur gentleman scientist would have had in his library in the nineteen-tens. And we throw a huge, lavish party, and everyone comes, and there is laughter and drinking and delicious food. I’m in a beautiful, clingy fifties swing dress, and you are in a suit and tie. At some point in the evening, when everyone is a few drinks in, you pull me into a private corner of a small room and slip your hand up my dress, murmuring into my ear what will happen when the guests have gone home. And then later, when you have kissed the last person on the cheek and locked the front door, we fumble and tumble our way toward the library, where you push me down on a lush, red divan and I unknot your tie and unbutton your shirt, and there among the bones and the books and the paintings you slide your hand up me and bite my neck and after I come I jerk you off while dead things look over us.” This fantasy springs up so fully formed it feels like it’s already happened in some past era, as if instead of creating it you’ve just plucked it out of a soup of history and consciousness. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Lesbian Cult Classic You arrange to hang out at her house. You are going to watch The Brave Little Toaster, a movie you haven’t seen since childhood but that you remember loving and being terrified of. You sit inches from each other on a green velvet couch, drinks sweating on the coffee table. When your favorite number is on—the junkyard cars singing bleakly of their erstwhile lives, reminding you that they are now worthless and about to die—her index finger drifts against your hand, and you feel a clench of desire. You know this move. You’ve done this move a thousand times: I am too shy to turn to you and tell you what I want; instead, I will pretend that I am not quite in control of this single, nomadic digit. The movie ends, and you both sit there in the dark. You start to nervously chatter about trivia—“Did you know the story this movie is based on won a Nebula Award? It—” She kisses you. Upstairs, you both tumble onto her bed. She never kisses you in the same place twice. Then she says, “I’d like to take your shirt off. May I?” And you nod, and she does. She slides her hand around your bra clasp. “Is this all right?” she asks. The room smells like lavender, or maybe you just remember that because her comforter was lavender. Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?” and the thrill of saying yes, yes, is like the pulsing of the tide over your face, and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission. Dream House as Famous Last Words “We can fuck,” she says, “but we can’t fall in love.” 2 2. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958), Type T3, Omens in love affairs.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Confession She was short and pale and rail-thin and androgynous, with fine blonde hair about which she was inordinately vain. Blue eyes, an easy smile. You are embarrassed now to say that you were impressed by her in a very strange, old-fashioned way. Despite being from Florida, she had a distinctly upper-class, New England air. She had gone to Harvard, looked dapper in a blazer, and carried a leather-encased hip flask preppier than any accessory you’ve ever seen. You have always suspected that you are shallow when it comes to desire, and there it was: all of those factors flipped your brain inside out and turned your cunt to pudding. Maybe you were always some kind of hedonist-cum-social climber-cum-cummer and you just never knew it. Despite the fact that you were the same age, you felt like she was older than you: wiser, more experienced, worldlier. She’d worked in publishing, she’d lived abroad, she spoke fluent French. She’d lived in New York and been to launch parties for literary magazines. And, it turned out, she had a weakness for curvy-to-fat brunettes in glasses. God herself couldn’t have planned it better. Dream House as Dreamboat You love writing across from her, the two of you tapping away with verve and purpose, and occasionally peeking over the edges of your laptops at each other with goofily contorted faces. When you go out to dinner, she orders tuna sashimi and insists on placing it on your tongue. It is sturdy, labial. It melts there. She orders dirty vodka martinis and you come to love their brine. She reads your stories, marvels at the beauty of your sentences. You listen to her read an old essay about how her parents never let her eat sugary cereal. You tell her, often, how hysterically funny she is. Dream House as Luck of the Draw Part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky. She did what you’d wished a million others had done—looked past arbitrary markers of social currency and seen your brain and ferocious talent and quick wit and pugnacious approach to assholes. When you started writing about fatness—a long time ago, in your LiveJournal—a commenter said to you that you were pretty and smart and charming, but as long as you were zaftig you’d never have your choice of lovers. You remember feeling outrage, and then processing the reality, the practicality, of what he’d said. You were so angry at the world. You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In fact, the erotic imagination is fueled by a host of feelings that are far from proper: aggression, raw lust, infantile neediness, power, revenge, selfishness, and jealousy (to name only a few). These feelings, which are all permanent residents of our intimate relations, can threaten the stability of our connection and make love miserable. It is much easier, and often wiser, to banish them to the edge of our imagination, where they can do no harm. In the antechambers of the erotic mind, the rules of propriety are turned on their heads, often invited in for the sole purpose of being trampled. Forbidden frontiers are crossed, gender roles are reversed, modesty is corrupted, and imbalances of power are luxuriously played out, all for the sake of excitement. In fantasy we act out what we dare not do in reality. Joni and Ray Joni’s lament goes something like this: “Ray thinks I don’t like sex. But I do like sex, or at least I used to, I just don’t like it so much with him. He doesn’t get me sexually, and I can’t seem to let him in on it, either. It feels hopeless. I’m only twenty-nine. That’s too young to stop having sex.” “Is there a right age to stop having sex?” I ask her. “Later maybe we can pick a date. For now, I’d rather know what is it you want from Ray that you’re not getting.” “I want him to be more of a man, and I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud.” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t even know what it means. Like I want him to be some kind of 1950s Neanderthal. But I don’t want that. My mother had that. I don’t think my father ever asked her what she liked, in the bedroom or out of it. Ray is a mensch. He’s a real gentleman, he respects me, and he lets me be. I love how easy our relationship is, but it doesn’t do a thing for me sexually.” “What’s missing?” I inquire. Suddenly she leans over and grabs my wrist, not roughly, but with confidence. “This is what I want,” she says. Then, tentatively, gently, she brushes my forearm and adds, “This is what I get.” “So he’s passive?” “Not exactly. He initiates sex all the time, but the way he does it makes me crazy. He just sort of raises his eyebrows and goes, ‘Hmmm?’ It feels like he’s asking me, ‘Am I going to get laid tonight?’ like I’m supposed to take over from there.” “He has a way of approaching you that doesn’t say, ‘I want you,’ as much as ‘Do you want me?’ Is that it?” “Yes!” Joni shouts. I explain that if I’m going to understand what she wants from Ray, first I have to understand what it is she wants sex to provide. “If sex is a quest,” I ask her, “what is your Holy Grail?”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “I don’t get how your flings were supposed to be taking care of me, though I know in your mind it makes sense,” Jackie tells him. “It’s not OK, but I understand it. Still, I was always surprised at how easily you let yourself be caught. Like you were asking for it, so you could come to Mommy and get punished. I’m not interested in replaying your family drama. I’ll leave you first, and you know it.” To me she says, “Realizing I had the strength to leave helped me make the choice to stay. I have a lot more freedom. When I initiate sex now, I can feel almost brazen, and I like that. ‘You want this, Philip? Take it!’ It doesn’t have to be romantic or even particularly personal. I like a lot of different things. I prefer tender love, but sometimes greedy is good, too.” I’ve worked with Jackie and Philip on and off for years. Philip has stopped acting out, and over time he has searched for ways to undo the deeply ingrained belief that hot sex can’t happen at home. By finding ways to experience himself as a sexual man who is also a faithful man, he was able to undo family patterns that were at least three generations old. In the past, Philip’s fascination with porn was a haven for him, a fantasy of immediacy where the moment of desire and satisfaction merged. The women on the screen offered no resistance and required no effort on his part. Hence the tension between wanting and getting was nullified, and Philip never had to reconcile desire in the context of love. Gradually, he has allowed the dislocated parts of his sexuality to come home, and has been more able to remain present with his wife. The ongoing challenge for Jackie and Philip is to continue to bring the erotic home—to experience small transgressions, illicit striving, and passionate idealization in the midst of their intimate lives. The English analyst Adam Phillips underscores this point in his book Monogamy: If it is the forbidden that is exciting—if desire is fundamentally transgressive—then the monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough. In other words they have to work, if only to keep what is always too available sufficiently illicit to be interesting. Can You Want What You Have?

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  By giving in to the temptation, Adam and Eve are essentially claiming that God isn’t good. They’re giving in to the deception that good is possible apart from God, the source of all good. The scriptures call this being separated from “the life of God.”6 When these first people eat the fruit, it isn’t about the fruit, it’s about their dissatisfaction with the world God has placed them in. Creation isn’t good enough for them. From their perspective, their place in the midst of it isn’t good enough. And so they eat the fruit and everything falls apart. They’re tempted with something that promises what it can’t deliver, and they live with the consequences. Lust comes from a deep lack of satisfaction with life. This is why we have to slow down and reflect on our lives before we’ll ever begin to sort out the significance of this. Lust often starts with a thought somewhere in our head or heart: “If I had that/him/her/it, then I’d be . . .” When we’re not at peace, when we aren’t content, when we aren’t in a good place, our radar gets turned on. We’re looking. Searching. And we’re sensory creatures, so it won’t be long before something, or somebody, catches our attention. And it always revolves around the “if,” doesn’t it? If I just . . . The idea creeps into our head and heart that we are lacking, that we are incomplete, that this craving in front of us is the answer. The “if” means we have become attached to the idea that we are missing something and that we can be satisfied by whatever it is we have in our sights.7 There’s a hole, a space, a gap, and we’re on the search. And we may not even realize it. When we are in the right place, the right space—content and at peace—we aren’t on the search, and our radar gets turned off. Adam and Eve fixate on this one piece of fruit from this one tree when God has given them endless trees with infinite varieties of fruit to enjoy. Which is often our problem. There’s so much to enjoy, and yet we fixate on something we don’t have. This is why gratitude is so central to the life God made us for. Until we can center ourselves on what we do have, on what God has given us, on the life we do get to live, we’ll constantly be looking for another life. That is why the word remember occurs again and again in the Bible.8 God commands his people to remember who they are, where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, what’s been done for them. If we stop remembering, we may forget. And that’s when the trouble comes. Head Space

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Man vs. NatureIn New York City you visit a store that sells natural and scientific ephemera. Deer skulls in cases, petrified wood, articulated bat skeletons in bell jars, amethyst geodes as tall as a child, taxidermied mice, trilobite fossils, leather-bound birding books. There is something hypnotic about this store. You wish you could spend all day there; you wish you could spend thousands of dollars there. It reminds you of a store you used to go to as a kid—Natural Wonders, RIP—and how it always made you feel like equal parts Ellie Sattler and Lara Croft. That night, lying next to her on a futon, you tell her about a fantasy you have: “We have a beautiful home; the sort of home that has its own library, filled with books and the sort of things an amateur gentleman scientist would have had in his library in the nineteen-tens. And we throw a huge, lavish party, and everyone comes, and there is laughter and drinking and delicious food. I’m in a beautiful, clingy fifties swing dress, and you are in a suit and tie. At some point in the evening, when everyone is a few drinks in, you pull me into a private corner of a small room and slip your hand up my dress, murmuring into my ear what will happen when the guests have gone home. And then later, when you have kissed the last person on the cheek and locked the front door, we fumble and tumble our way toward the library, where you push me down on a lush, red divan and I unknot your tie and unbutton your shirt, and there among the bones and the books and the paintings you slide your hand up me and bite my neck and after I come I jerk you off while dead things look over us.” This fantasy springs up so fully formed it feels like it’s already happened in some past era, as if instead of creating it you’ve just plucked it out of a soup of history and consciousness. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.” Dream House as Stoner ComedyIt is summer in New York, and the heat is an animal that won’t climb off. You’re staying in her friend’s apartment in Crown Heights, and you and she and Val smoke a lot of weed. You have never been a pot person—you have, in fact, been a bit of a ninny when it comes to drugs; when you even say the word drugs you feel ridiculous—but you smoke because she does and she’ll be annoyed if you don’t. (“What, you think you’re better than all this?” she says once when you decline; after that, you don’t decline.) You cough and cough because you’ve never gotten used to smoke.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Whatever it is that has its hooks in you, you will never be free from it until you find something you want more. It’s not about getting rid of desire. It’s about giving ourselves to bigger and better and more powerful desires. What are you channeling your energies into?16 Because they will go somewhere. If they don’t go into a few, select, disciplined pursuits that you are passionate about and are willing to give your life to, then they’ll dissipate into all sorts of urges and cravings that won’t even begin to bring the joy that the “one thing” could. You are crammed full of the “madness of the gods.” And you will end up giving the force of your being to something. Maybe it’s as simple as asking God to show it to you, to give it to you, to make you aware of it. There was a story all over the news about a television star whose boyfriend videotaped the two of them having sex and then put it on the internet. Apparently lots of people were watching it, and she was crushed. Which is sad. But what’s tragic is that she was known for having sex and shopping. It kind of became her schtick—she was making a career out of being shallow. Now, of course, she was all over the media, and she was making lots of money, so she was clearly much smarter than she let on, but she was made for so much more than this. Her life force was tremendous. But the problem was she hadn’t channeled it into something, or a few things, that were good and true and beautiful. She hadn’t focused all of that God-given sexual energy into the ongoing creation of a better and better world. And so she fell for all of these temptations that robbed her of the joy she was made for. The last thing she needed to do is tone down those energies. She simply needed to redirect them. What is it you’ve given your life to? Life is not about toning down and repressing your God-given life force. It’s about channeling it and focusing it and turning it loose on something beautiful, something pure and true and good, something that connects you with God, with others, with the world. What do you want more? How can you make your life about that so that you won’t be tempted to give in to this? CHAPTER FIVE SHE RAN INTO THE GIRLS’ BATHROOM When I was twelve, I went to a dance at my school. It was held in the cafeteria, where they folded up the lunch tables and brought in a DJ. The girls stood on one side of the room, the boys stood on the other. Every once in a while, somebody would bravely venture across this massive chasm to ask someone to dance, and then everybody would watch them. Perhaps you endured this particular form of torture at some point in your adolescence.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  First, the command doesn’t stop with the “don’t” part. The writer understands that that kind of instruction rarely helps. When we’re told not to do something, how often are we truly compelled not to do it, especially if we enjoy it? If it’s just me against the lust, the odds are already against me. But there’s something else going on here. Stealing involves large amounts of adrenaline. The rush of planning, pulling it off, not getting caught, getting something for nothing. And then there’s the expectation of next time. If we got something this significant for free, could we steal something even more valuable? What if we raised the stakes, hit a store with a better security system, tested ourselves? Stealing involves the senses, the intellect, a person’s fear threshold. It even has a powerful social dynamic. Stealing with someone creates powerful bonds between people. When our adrenaline is pumping, that’s a physiological phenomenon. It feels good because things are happening with the chemicals in our bodies, with our nerves and brain and bloodstream. If we do that enough, our bodies get used to it. We could use the word addicted. A person gets addicted to it. If you tell the person who’s stealing not to, and you leave it at that, you’ve taken something away, but you haven’t replaced it with anything. That’s why the instructions in Ephesians are so brilliant. The urging to stop stealing is followed by the command to have the person do “something useful with their own hands.” The word useful is the Greek word agathos, which is also translated “good” and “benevolent.” Why does the writer mention the hands? Because you steal with your hands. Stealing is a sensory experience, an adrenaline rush involving the hands. The command is to replace one adrenaline rush with another, a better one, one that’s good. But it doesn’t stop there. The command ends with the person who was stealing learning to do something good with their hands so that they can take care of the needs of someone else. Stealing is about taking from someone. This passage is about giving to someone who has less because you have more. Stealing is the ultimate in being selfish. Making something and giving it away is the ultimate in being generous. This passage is about something central to what it means to be human: it’s about desire. It’s about the thief finding something they’ll desire more than stealing. “You thought taking things for free was a rush? Try giving free food to someone who’s starving.” The writer of Ephesians understands that to tell the thief not to steal and leave it at that doesn’t have a very high chance of being helpful. The thief will be left with a battle on their hands that will pit them against their craving.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Maybe it’s her perfume or the feel of that fabric or how these have a particular shape and form or what it feels like to open a package of those. Smoking isn’t just about nicotine, is it? It’s about opening a new pack, the feel of the paper, the smell of the cigarette. Fishing isn’t just about fish. It’s about the rocking of the boat and the morning air and what’s in the cooler. Shopping isn’t just about new clothes. It’s about the tags and the fabrics and the sound of the hangers sliding on the rack. We are sensory creatures. My brother just got a new Apple computer. Several of us were there when he opened it, and we were so into it that we were actually handing the various parts around the room. If you have taken part in this particular ritual, then you know that Apple ships everything in white and silver bags and liners that would make dirt look attractive. We were even passing the power cord around the room, admiring its design. Were we losing our minds? The power cord? The designers at Apple understand something significant about what it means to be human: we are hardwired to appreciate sensory experience.5 Texture, shape, color, feel, aroma. The things God creates in Genesis are “pleasing to the eye.” We have an ingrained sense of appreciation for how things look and feel and smell because God has an appreciation for how things look and feel and smell. We bear the image of our maker. The problem for Adam and Eve isn’t the food. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the food. The food is good. This is what Eve notices about it, that it’s “good for food.” It’s created by God for the enjoyment of people. The same goes for most of the things and people we lust for. In most cases, there’s nothing wrong with them inherently— her body, that product, this food. The problem for Adam and Eve is what the fruit has come to represent. Rebellion against God. Rejection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Another way. This is really about that. If I Just Had . . . The appeal to Eve’s senses comes with a promise that the fruit will deliver something it can’t—specifically, a better reality than the one God has made. The problem isn’t the fruit. It’s what is promised through the fruit—that she won’t die if she eats it. The problem is that she’s told, “When you eat of it . . .” and then she’s told things that aren’t true. Promises are made to her that the temptation can’t come through on. It’s a lie. Lust promises what it can’t deliver.