Despair

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.

Page 106 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He spoke once more, drowning me out. His voice was very calm, very soft. “Kill me, Anney. Kill me.” I tried to reach her with my right hand but the pain made me gasp. “Mama,” I pleaded, but she still wasn’t looking at me. “Lord God, Lord God, Lord God.” Her cry was low, sibilant, painful. She was holding him, his head pressed to her belly. His bloody hairline was visible past the angle of her hip. “Mama,” I whispered. “Help me, God,” she pleaded in a raw, terrible voice. “Help me.” I could see her fingers on Glen’s shoulder, see the white knuckles holding him tight. My mouth closed over the shout I would not let go. Rage burned in my belly and came up my throat. I’d said I could never hate her, but I hated her now for the way she held him, the way she stood there crying over him. Could she love me and still hold him like that? I let my head fall back. I did not want to see this. I wanted Travis’s shotgun, or my sharp killing hook. I wanted everything to stop, the world to end, anything, but not to lie bleeding while she held him and cried. I looked up into white sky going gray. The first stars would come out as the sky darkened. I wanted to see that, the darkness and the stars. I heard a roar far off, a wave of night and despair waiting for me, and followed it out into the darkness. 21 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Aunt Alma has a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, with a few wedding invitations, funeral announcements, and baby pictures pasted down beside page after page of headlines. “Oh, we’re always turning up in the news,” she used to joke when she’d show people that book. Her favorite is the four-page spread the Greenville News did when Uncle Earle’s convertible smashed into the barbershop across the street from the county courthouse a few months before it burned down. There are pictures of the front end of the car propped up on a barber stool just a few feet short of splintered silvered mirrors, another of Earle sitting on the curb leaning forward with his head in his hands, and a series of the barber picking through the remains of his shop with the help of a highway patrolman and Granny Boatwright. The barber looks funny, holding up his shaving brush and cup in fingers that blur a little so that you can see he must have still been shaking. HE DIDN’T COME IN FOR A SHAVE, the headline reads under the picture of the car on the stool. BOATWRIGHT captions the close-up of Earle’s numb face.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Come on, Bone,” she whispered. “We’re going home.” She thanked Uncle Wade in a tired voice. Her hair was limp and her face scrubbed clean. She was still wearing that pullover sweater, but she’d added a loose white shirt and changed back to her waitress flats. “Don’t talk,” she told me. “Just get Reese’s shoes and come on.” She lifted Reese without disturbing Aunt Alma and carried her out to the car. I followed her, holding on to her right side while Reese leaned into her left shoulder. At the car, she paused and looked up into the dark night sky. In the light from the house, her face was all hollows and angles, her eyes sunken and glittery. “Damn!” she whispered softly, and leaned her forehead against the cool metal above the car door. “Damn, damn.” “Mama,” Reese whimpered. I pressed my cheek against Mama’s side and kept still. There was a long cold moment while we waited, and then Mama pushed herself back up straight and opened the door. “All right,” she said, as if she were wrapping up some long conversation with herself. “All right.” I looked back to Aunt Alma’s house. Uncle Wade was standing in the kitchen looking out at us, his face stern and his mouth hard. Why was he angry? I wondered. What could have made him look so terribly angry? [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “Cook you some eggs,” Mama said as she steered us into the kitchen and sat us at the table. There was flour in a can, a jar of jelly, butter in a dish, a bag of tomatoes, fatback in a sealed package, and a carton of fresh eggs all speckled brown. She put most of it away and then whipped the eggs up with sweet milk, laying slices of green tomato to fry around the sides of the pan before she poured the eggs in. “My mama used to cook this late at night,” she announced, blinking in the too-bright light. Daddy Glen was sitting in the living room in front of the television set with the sound turned down low, not looking at us and not speaking. I watched Reese’s eyes flicker toward him and then back to Mama and over to me. Daddy Glen’s hands kept moving on his thighs, the fingers working into knots, tightening on his trousers and then shaking against the dark fabric like the legs of dying june bugs turned belly up in the night. Mama pulled a tray of biscuits out of the oven and grinned at us.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up. No matter what Mama said, I knew that it wasn’t just because of where she lived that I had never spent much time with Aunt Raylene. For all she was a Boatwright woman, there were ways Raylene had always been different from her sisters. She was quieter, more private, living alone with her dogs and fishing lines, and seemingly happy that way. She had always lived out past the city limits, and her house was where the older boy cousins tended to go. Out at Raylene’s they could smoke and curse and roughhouse without interference. She let kids do pretty much anything they wanted. With none of her own, Raylene was convinced that the best way to raise children was to give them their head. “There’s no evil in them,” she’d always say. “They’re just like puppies. They need to wear themselves out now and then.” Raylene’s place was easy to get to on the Eustis Highway but set off by itself on a little rise of land. The Greenville River curved around the outcropping where her weathered old shotgun house stood, and from the porch that went around three sides, you could watch the river and the highway that skirted it. Raylene kept the trees cut back and the shrubs low to the ground. “I don’t like surprises,” she always said. “I like to see who’s coming up on me.” When Raylene was young, Uncle Earle told me, she had been kind of wild. At seventeen she had run off with a guy who drove for the carnival, but she never married him. She came home two years later to take a job in the textile mill and rent the house where she still lived. Before he went off to Oklahoma, Butch told me that Raylene had worked for the carnival like a man, cutting off her hair and dressing in overalls. She’d called herself Ray, and with her short, stocky build, big shoulders, and small breasts, I could easily see how no one had questioned her. It was astonishing to imagine running off like that, and I would think about it with wistful longing.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Sometimes I hate myself, but I love him. I love him.” I looked up. Mama’s eyes were deep and glittery. Her mouth was open, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her neck muscles high and rigid. Her chin went up and down as if she wanted to cry but couldn’t. “I’ve just wanted it to be all right,” she whispered. “For so long, I’ve just hoped and prayed, dreamed and pretended. I’ve hung on, just hung on.” “Mama,” I whimpered, and tried to push up to her. “I made him mad. I did.” “Bone.” Raylene reached for me. “ No !” I jerked away and pressed my face against Mama’s arm. “Hush. Hush.” Mama breathed. I held still and heard Raylene’s hand drop. We listened to the noises from the porch. Those thuds were Daddy Glen hitting the wall. Those grunts were his. Those curses were my uncles’. I put my fingers in my mouth and bit down. I looked up. Above me Mama’s face and Raylene’s were almost touching, both of them trembling and holding on as if their lives depended on each other. Bastard Out of Carolina 18 T hings come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. It was that way with Mama and Daddy Glen. Aunt Raylene offered to let us all come stay with her, but Mama wouldn’t consider it. The one day Daddy Glen spent in the hospital, she moved us into an apartment over the Fish Market just a few blocks from the boarded-up windows of Woolworth’s. Every morning, I had to walk past those windows to get to the intersection where the bus picked us up for school. I saw the workmen replacing the shattered display windows with new plate glass panels, and one day I saw a very harassed-looking Tyler Highgarden supervising while box after box of dimestore notions was carried through the repaired doors. He never even looked in my direction, but I still felt the hair on the back of my neck rise up stiff and electrical. If everything hadn’t been so confused, I might have told Mama what I’d done. But Mama and I did not talk at all. It was a two-room apartment, one bedroom and a larger room that served for everything else. The kitchen was a stove, icebox, and sink in a little alcove to the side of the bedroom door. The bathroom smelled of damp, mildew, and fish, the latter seeping up from the shop below.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Something had to be done. Go into the bedroom, Stephen Gordon’s bedroom that faced on the courtyard . . . just a few short steps and then the window. A girl, hatless, with the sun falling full on her hair . . . she was almost running . . . she stumbled a little. But now there were two people down in the courtyard—a man had his hands on the girl’s bowed shoulders. He questioned her, yes, that was it, he questioned; and the girl was telling him why she was there, why she had fled from that thick, awful darkness. He was looking at the house, incredulous, amazed; hesitating as though he were coming in; but the girl went on and the man turned to follow . . . They were side by side, he was gripping her arm . . . They were gone; they had passed out under the archway. Then all in a moment the stillness was shattered: ‘Mary, come back! Come back to me, Mary!’ David crouched and trembled. He had crawled to the bed, and he lay there watching with his eyes of amber; trembling because such an anguish as this struck across him like the lash of a whip, and what could he do, the poor beast, in his dumbness? She turned and saw him, but only for a moment, for now the room seemed to be thronging with people. Who were they, these strangers with the miserable eyes? And yet, were they all strangers? Surely that was Wanda? And some one with a neat little hole in her side—Jamie clasping Barbara by the hand; Barbara with the white flowers of death on her bosom. Oh, but they were many, these unbidden guests, and they called very softly at first and then louder. They were calling her by name, saying: ‘Stephen, Stephen!’ The quick, the dead, and the yet unborn—all calling her, softly at first and then louder. Aye, and those lost and terrible brothers from Alec’s, they were here, and they also were calling: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert—eyes that had looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and all understanding: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ And these terrible ones started pointing at her with their shaking, white-skinned, effeminate fingers: ‘You and your kind have stolen our birthright; you have taken our strength and have given us your weakness!’ They were pointing at her with white, shaking fingers.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Excluding Hope As a beginning point it may be affirmed that the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon. Israel had no doubt that since the Solomonic achievement the royal prosperity was increasingly closed to large numbers of the Israelites. That indeed is a key point in the polemics of Amos. And so, in that time as in our own, the royal arrangement surely and properly evokes despair among those who are shut out. It is equally important to perceive that those who have entry to power and prosperity are also victims of hopelessness, or in a more contemporary idiom, have a sense of powerlessness. The royal consciousness means to overcome history and therefore by design the future loses its vitality and authority. The present ordering, and by derivation the present regime, claims to be the full and final ordering. That claim means there can be no future that either calls the present into question or promises a way out of it. Thus the fulsome claim of the present arrangement is premised on hopelessness. This insidious form of realized eschatology requires persons to live without hope. The present is unending in its projection, uncompromising in its claim of loyalty, and unaccommodating in having its own way. In the words of a recent beer commercial, you can be totalitarian when “you believe in what you’re doing” and you conclude that one way is the “right way.” I believe the Solomonic regime created such a situation of despair. Inevitably it had to hold on desperately and despairingly to the present, for if the present slipped away, there would be nothing. The future had already been annulled. I do not find it farfetched to imagine the lack of promise in Ecclesiastes to be pertinent to the royal consciousness: What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already, in the ages before us. (Eccl 1:9-10) There is nothing new, partly because nothing seemed to be happening but also because the regime had ordered and decreed it that way. The need to annul the future must lead to a situation in which hope is also denied. In concrete terms, technological, agricultural, and other social advances are impeded in aristocratic monarchies because the taxes, tithes, tribute, tolls, rents, and confiscations drain all the peasants’ resources and rationale for creativity; only the technology of warfare advances at a more rapid pace because that contributes to the expansion and control of the king and his entourage. [3] Furthermore, the authority of the king rests on dynastic tradition; so introducing new visions opens the possibility of challenges to the tradition and therefore the king’s authority.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  This time the spring within me is quite broken; my strength and my will power fail me now. I might have stopped before leaving Tunis, or at the customs, or in a railroad station on my way, or at the entrance to the college. But I stopped in the examination room. It really is the end: I shall never be a professor. ~ 8. DEPARTURE ~ It was on the interminable return trip, during the twenty-six hours in the train, that I decided to leave Tunis with Henry. As a matter of fact, I do not quite see what else I might have done, except let myself die here. Every morning, fits of coughing exasperate me and send the blood rushing to my head, like an echo of my father’s spells of asthma. I used to be so full of disgust and pity for this ritual of pain, and here am I already aping him. It is high time for me to leave or to complete my ruin. It was a very tiring night. The wooden railroad car bumped us about on the seats and against the walls. My companions had shut the door and the window of our compartment. Soon the air became stifling and my temples and neck were sticky with sweat and soot. Once, I almost fell asleep, but the suitcase that was on my knees and on which I rested my arms and head was jerked away. Outside the compartment, the cold made me cough violently, but at least I could think. Once I had thrown up the sponge in the exam, I never entered the college again. But I did not wish to leave Algiers before having set the whole matter straight; after that, I was face to face with myself. If I now remain alive, I’ll never forget this extraordinary meeting and the strange way I came up against myself. So I have progressed from crisis to crisis, each time finding a new equilibrium, though a bit more precariously; still, there was always something left that could be destroyed. This time, the accounts are balanced: at last nothing shields me from myself. I made my break with our blind alley because it was but a childish dream, then with my father and my mother when I grew ashamed of them, with values of our community because they were obsolete, with ambition and the middle-class world because they are unjust and their ideals all questionable, with the city because it still lives in Oriental medievalism and has no love for me, with the West because it lies and is selfish. Each time, a part of me has disintegrated. I thought of death, of leaving the world. But never has the idea of death been so familiar and so present, like a ripe decision.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  announcements of Jesus are the decisive dismissal of every self-serving form of power upon which the royal consciousness is based. Just that formula, Son of man must suffer —Son of man/suffer!—is more than the world can tolerate, for the phrase of ultimate power, “Son of man,” has as its predicate the passion to death. It is true that no precise counterpart can be found in the history of Moses. Moses never speaks or acts in this way; but we may pause to discern important continuities between the two. Moses also dismantled the empire and declared it to be a no-power (remember Exod 8:18) by disregarding the claims of the imperial reality and trusting fully in the Lord of justice and freedom. In parallel fashion, the dominant power is dismantled by appeal to an uncredentialed God. That the passion sayings of Jesus constitute the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness is evident in the reaction of the faithful. First, Peter, on behalf of the church, rejects the criticism as too radical and he is roundly reprimanded (Mark 8:32-33). Second, the disciples did not understand and are afraid to ask (9:32). Third, they respond, indicating they understood nothing, by fresh dispute about their own power and authority (10:35-37). The criticism of Jesus is too radical, not only for the imperial managers but also for his own followers. None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism. Sayings on the Cross. Jesus’ sayings on the cross as preserved in the various traditions are the voice of an alternative consciousness. His initial plea for forgiveness for his enemies is an act of criticism (Luke 23:34), for it asserts the insanity of the dominant culture. On behalf of that world that has now sentenced him, he enters a plea of temporary insanity . A reference should be made here to the insightful interpretation of Paul Lehmann, who shows that the trial of Jesus before Pilate in fact has Pilate, and not Jesus, on trial. [17] The cry of Jesus from the cross, then, may be regarded as a decision (by the Judge) that the defendant (the old order) may not be punished because it is insane. Second, his cry of despair is an announcement of abandonment (Mark 15:34). The whole known network of meaning has collapsed and a new, dangerous situation of faith has emerged. [18] Thus Jesus experiences the result of the criticism; the old assurances and awarenesses of meaning are now all gone. [19]

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It may seem immodest not to mention as well the simple fear I had of the war. Not that I never thought of it. But the idea of death had so often been with me beside my bed, obscurely tempting but rejected, that the anguish of battle could not be much worse. Meanwhile, I wrote also to the Military Commander of the city and waited a long time for his answer, which said that nothing had been planned for people in my category. Finally, after much reasoning I admitted what the masses had immediately felt intuitively. I could only be a victim of this war; never would I be accepted as one of the victors. In the end this side of the question was cleared up completely. A member of the Chamber of Deputies demanded the mobilization of native Africans, but the Algerian Assembly refused. From a distance, we followed the disappointing debate. The heads of our community then proposed, of their own accord, that the Jews be conscripted. That too was refused. Such a collective measure would evidently have meant extending the rights and advantages of servicemen to their families, and that was out of the question. There was no longer any reason to doubt; for the second time, the West had rejected and betrayed us. The first time, I had been able to find an excuse for it: the Vichy government was much criticized by the Western powers. This time, however, there could no longer be any doubt. Some time later it was rumored that one could join the Second Gaullist Armored Division in Tripoli. Apparently, they did not dare send back those who had traveled so far to enlist. But I did not make any further moves. I would never be a Westerner. I rejected the West. Still, my ideas were too confused and my heart too passionately involved in all that happened, so that I could not fully realize my position or draw practical conclusions from it. I had rejected the East and had been rejected by the West. What would I ever become? What was my future? Again, I fell prey to harassing doubts, utterly overwhelmed. At least there were now few air raids, and I could rest better. So I spent most of my afternoons with Henry. For hours, I would listen to him dreaming about wealth in Argentina and the wonderful life out in the open, on horseback, in boots and sombreros. I did not argue about the war any more. He had included it in his plans, which became more complex. First, we would go to England and join the British forces which were less difficult than the French. He had found out that British R.A.F. pilots were being trained in America. We might do a little fighting, to satisfy me. Afterwards, as the war drew to a close, we could get ourselves demobilized in America. From there, we could get to Argentina.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Are you exceedingly angry with us? (Lam 5:20-21) There is the risk of a petition, but with little conviction. The last pair of rhetorical questions seems to expect the worst. The inability to imagine or even tolerate a new intrusion is predictable given the characteristic royal capacity to manage all the pieces. It is so even in our personal lives, in which we conclude that the given dimensions we have frequently rearranged are the only dimensions that exist. To imagine a new gift given from the outside violates our reason. We are able to believe no more in the graciousness of God than we are in the judgment of God. We are largely confined to reflections on the given pieces, and our modest expectations are confined by our reason, our language, and our epistemology. We have no public arenas in which serious hopefulness can be brought to articulation. What is most needed is what is most unacceptable—an articulation that redefines the situation and that makes way for new gifts about to be given. Without a public arena for the articulation of gifts that fall outside our conventional rationality, we are fated to despair. We know full well the makings of genuine newness are not included among these present pieces. And short of genuine newness life becomes a dissatisfied coping, a grudging trust, and a managing that dares never ask too much. My judgment is that such a state of affairs not only is evident in the exile of Judah but is characteristic of most situations of ministry. When we try to face the holding action that defines the sickness, the aging, the marriages, and the jobs of very many people, we find that we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. Such hope is an enemy of the very royal consciousness with which most of us have secured a working arrangement. The question facing ministry is whether there is anything that can be said, done, or acted in the face of the ideology of hopelessness.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and go away from them! (Jer 8:22—9:2) In his opening concerning the balm, the prophet asks a question. He does not make an affirmation as in the African American spiritual (“There Is a Balm in Gilead”), but leaves the question unanswered. The second question is asked in deeper pathos: Is there no doctor? [12] Failing an answer he must now deepen his expression of pain. The answer was not given because answering is the way of royal Israel. Now it is time not for answers but for questions that defy answers because the royal answering service no longer functions. Answers from that source presume control and symmetry. And that is gone.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach. The Rorschach tests also taught us that traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people. For most of us a man coming down the street is just someone taking a walk. A rape victim, however, may see a person who is about to molest her and go into a panic. A stern schoolteacher may be an intimidating presence to an average kid, but for a child whose stepfather beats him up, she may represent a torturer and precipitate a rage attack or a terrified cowering in the corner. Stuck in TraumaOur clinic was inundated with veterans seeking psychiatric help. However, because of an acute shortage of qualified doctors, all we could do was put most of them on a waiting list, even as they continued brutalizing themselves and their families. We began seeing a sharp increase in arrests of veterans for violent offenses and drunken brawls—as well as an alarming number of suicides. I received permission to start a group for young Vietnam veterans to serve as a sort of holding tank until “real” therapy could start.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Next I asked him to stay focused on it and see how he felt toward it now. He said he was curious to know more about it. I asked him how old it was. He said about seven. I asked him to have his critic show him what he protected. After a lengthy silence, still with his eyes closed, he told me that he was witnessing a scene from his childhood. His father was beating a little boy, him, and he was standing to one side thinking how stupid that kid was to provoke his dad. When I asked him how he felt about the boy who was getting hurt, he told me that he despised him. He was a weakling and a whiner; after showing even the least bit of defiance to his dad’s high-handed ways, he inevitably capitulated and whimpered that he would be a good little boy. He had no guts, no fire in his belly. I asked the critic if he would be willing to step aside so we could see what was going on with that boy. In response the critic appeared in full force and called him names like “wimp” and “sissy.” I asked Peter again if the critic would be willing to step aside and give the boy a chance to speak. He shut down completely and left the session saying that he was unlikely ever to set foot in my office again. But the following week he was back: As she had threatened, his wife had gone to a lawyer and filed for divorce. He was devastated and no longer looked anything like the perfectly put-together doctor whom I’d come to know and, in many ways, dread. Faced with the loss of his family, he became unhinged and felt comforted by the idea that if things got too bad he could take his life in his own hands. We went inside again and identified the part that was terrified of abandonment. Once he was in his mindful Self-state, I urged him to ask that terrified boy to show him the burdens he was carrying. Again, his first reaction was disgust at the boy’s weakness, but after I asked him to get that part to step back, he saw an image of himself as a young boy in his parents’ house, alone in his room, screaming in terror. Peter watched this scene for several minutes, weeping silently through much of it. I asked him if the boy had told him everything he wanted him to know. No, there were other scenes, like running to embrace his father at the door and getting slapped for having disobeyed his mother.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I returned for a time to my sexual loneliness and to my attempts to imagine one of the neighborhood girls in the nude or to give consistency and life to pin-up photographs. My attempt to escape from my aloneness had only forced me back on myself, all the poorer for the loss of my illusions. How I envied Sitboun, who dreamed at night of the girls he had noticed the day before! But I had reached a stage in my life when I was no longer satisfied with myself. As I got over the bitterness I felt after my first adventure and as my memories of it became blurred, there remained only the ghost of a woman whose pubes or breasts I still tried to recall. Then, driven by a new urge, I returned to the narrow alley of the red-light district. I was no less disappointed, but I was less surprised about it. I realized that this is all there is to physical love and that it always leaves one unassuaged. I did not return to search for rarer pleasures, but for something else which was not to be found. So I stayed away again for a while, but naturally came back again, each time promising myself never to return to the filth and disappointment and bitterness and loss of self-respect I experienced after each visit. Besides it was expensive, and I had to be careful. Thereafter, my sex-life, like all the rest of my life, went from one extreme to the other, from attempts at communion with others to hasty and nauseated retreats into despair. My disappointments were not merely physical, as a result of the hurried and indifferent behavior of the girls. I had not found what I was looking for and had hoped for so long: to make love to a human being. The girls’ faces remained blank and impersonal. One of them smoked, and another gossiped while I had my fun alone. Once, someone came along and banged on the door just as I was reaching the moment, so brief, when a man forgets where he is and with whom. Sometimes, the next customer standing outside would express his impatience, and I would try to take no more notice of it than of the other noises in the street. For some reason, the girl, on one such occasion, lost her temper and started to hurl insults at the waiting man. He replied in kind, and this vile dialogue continued across my body.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The time of year you couldn’t even go to the beach because of the toxic red tide, the time when the city dropped to its knees like ancient Sodom, praying for redemption. We sat in the car down the block from Barry’s house, under a carob tree. I hated the way she watched his house, her calm that was not even sane, like a patient hawk on top of a lightning-struck tree. But there was no point in trying to convince her to go home. She no longer spoke the language I did. I broke a carob pod under my nose and smelled the musky scent and pretended I was waiting for my father, a plumber inspecting some pipes in this small brick house with its dandelion-dotted lawn, its leaded picture window with a lamp in it. Then Barry came out, wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion, funky little John Lennon sunglasses, his hair in its ponytail. He got in the old gold Lincoln and drove away. “Come on,” my mother said. She put on a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind the photo editor used when he handled stills, and threw me a pair. I didn’t want to go with her but didn’t want to be left in the car either, so I went. We walked up the path to his house as if we belonged there, and my mother reached into the Balinese spirit house he kept on the porch and pulled out a key. Inside, I was seized again by the sadness of what had happened, the finality. Once I had thought I might even live there, with the big wayang kulit puppets, batik pillows, and dragon kites hanging from the ceiling. His statues of Shiva and Parvati in their eternal embrace hadn’t bothered me before, when I thought he and my mother would be like that, that it would last forever and engender a new universe. But now I hated them. My mother turned on his computer at the great carved desk. The machine whirred. She typed something in and all the things on the screen disappeared. I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. She took a horseshoe magnet from her purse and wiped it over all his floppy diskettes marked “backup.” “I almost feel sorry for him,” she said as she turned the computer off. “But not quite.” She took her X-acto knife and selected a shirt from his closet, his favorite brown shirt. “How right he should wear clothing the color of excrement.” She laid it on the bed and slashed it into fringe. Then she tucked a white oleander into a buttonhole. SOMEONE WAS pounding on our door. She looked up from a new poem she was writing.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal, Abilify, or Seroquel can significantly dampen the emotional brain and thus make patients less skittish or enraged, but they also may interfere with being able to appreciate subtle signals of pleasure, danger, or satisfaction. They also cause weight gain, increase the chance of developing diabetes, and make patients physically inert, which is likely to further increase their sense of alienation. These drugs are widely used to treat abused children who are inappropriately diagnosed with bipolar disorder or mood dysregulation disorder. More than half a million children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, which may calm them down but also interfere with learning age-appropriate skills and developing friendships with other children.[60] A Columbia University study recently found that prescriptions of antipsychotic drugs for privately insured two-to five-year-olds had doubled between 2000 and 2007.[61] Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment. Until it lost its patent, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson doled out LEGO blocks stamped with the word “Risperdal” for the waiting rooms of child psychiatrists. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines. In one year alone Texas Medicaid spent $96 million on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children—including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays.[62] There have been no studies on the effects of psychotropic medications on the developing brain. Dissociation, self-mutilation, fragmented memories, and amnesia generally do not respond to any of these medications. The Prozac study that I discussed in chapter 2 was the first to discover that traumatized civilians tend to respond much better to medications than do combat veterans.[63] Since then other studies have found similar discrepancies. In this light it is worrisome that the Department of Defense and the VA prescribe enormous quantities of medications to combat soldiers and returning veterans, often without providing other forms of therapy. Between 2001 and 2011 the VA spent about $1.5 billion on Seroquel and Risperdal, while Defense spent about $90 million during the same period, even though a research paper published in 2001 showed that Risperdal was no more effective than a placebo in treating PTSD.[64] Similarly, between 2001 and 2012 the VA spent $72.1 million and Defense spent $44.1 million on benzodiazepines[65]—medications that clinicians generally avoid prescribing to civilians with PTSD because of their addiction potential and lack of significant effectiveness for PTSD symptoms. The Road of Recovery Is the Road of LifeIn the first chapter of this book I introduced you to a patient named Bill whom I met over thirty years ago at the VA. Bill became one of my longtime patient-teachers, and our relationship is also the story of my evolution of trauma treatment.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On Friday evenings when they returned from work, several of the workers would go to the stream, in spite of the cold, to take an extra wash. They put on their least tattered clothes and slowly came back to the middle of the camp. I too had dressed up and awaited them with a few determined helpers, the group captains, and the scouts. We had agreed to stay at equal distances from each other and to form a circle. The men hesitated as they approached, argued among themselves and, in their minds, drew an imaginary circumference. At last they were all still. The moment I was about to open my mouth, a difficulty I had neglected occurred to me: although I had prepared my subject and even words which would be understood without awakening the suspicions of the guards who were looking on, I realized only now that I should speak in dialect. I think in French, and my interior monologues had for a long time been in French. When it happens that I speak to myself in dialect, I always have the strange impression, not so much of using a foreign language, as of hearing an obscure and obsolete part of myself, so forgotten that it is no longer native to me. I do not feel this strangeness when speaking to others, it is rather like playing on a musical instrument. But I did not know enough words of Judeo-Arabic to convey my whole meaning to them. I can express myself well enough in Arabic for concrete everyday purposes, but I have always used French in social and intellectual exchanges and the expression of ideas. I would have liked to speak at length to the men and, above all, convey to them certain things under the very noses of the guards. For that, certain subtleties which only French allowed me were necessary, but unfortunately their knowledge of French was deficient. In the last resort, I decided to attempt the experiment in French, although I realized how much closer I would have been to them and how much more intimate had I spoken their own tongue.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They: the young Sicilians, the Arab policeman, the French newspaper owner, our classmates at the lycée, the whole city in fact. And it was true that our native city was as hostile to us as an unnatural mother. We had been disappointed at one blow; it was final and couldn’t be healed. I admired Bissor and often asked myself if his reaction wasn’t the best. For a year I forced myself to go along with him and practice boxing in the same gym. I managed to acquire some skill, but I remained weak because I was undernourished. Nor did I ever manage to overcome the nausea that I experienced whenever I struck an opponent’s eyes, nose, or mouth. I was already suspicious of my body and disgusted whenever it affirmed its presence, for I knew that no amount of animal self-assertion could ever heal the wound my native city had inflicted on me. Later, I began to experience a strange new fear whenever I found myself in the bowel-like maze of the covered bazaar. I would feel a sudden nausea and that I must reach an open space as fast as possible, because otherwise I might knock my head against walls that were too close to me. ~ 2. HIGH SCHOOL ~ Created in the city’s image, the French lycée was peopled so variously that I immediately felt lost. I had French, Tunisian, Italian, Russian, Maltese, even Jewish classmates — but the latter were from a background so different from mine that they were as foreign to me as the others. They were rich Jews and of the second generation of Western culture; like all the others, they too made fun of the nasal ghetto accent which they imitated by confusing the French word savon (for soap) and savant (for scientist). Ill at ease in their presence, I was furious with them because of the facility with which they rolled the impossible r that Paris has imposed on the rest of France. I tried and resolved a thousand times to roll my r’s with the proper guttural sound until I found the right tone; but when I watched my speech, I lost the thread of my ideas and, if my thought was difficult to express, I had to leave my tongue in peace while I figured out what I wanted to say; it was then that I reverted to my peculiar speech with its sounds which were as foreign as those of Latin Americans or of exotic films, and deprived all that I said in French of any seriousness. But if I managed to speak as if I were clearing my throat, the others would laugh and imitate me. “You speak French like a German,” they would say, imitating the German accent.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Firefighters will do anything to make emotional pain go away. Aside from sharing the task of keeping the exiles locked up, they are the opposite of managers: Managers are all about staying in control, while firefighters will destroy the house in order to extinguish the fire. The struggle between uptight managers and out-of-control firefighters will continue until the exiles, which carry the burden of the trauma, are allowed to come home and be cared for. Anyone who deals with survivors will encounter those firefighters. I’ve met firefighters who shop, drink, play computer games addictively, have impulsive affairs, or exercise compulsively. A sordid encounter can blunt the abused child’s horror and shame, if only for a couple of hours. It is critical to remember that, at their core, firefighters are also desperately trying to protect the system. Unlike managers, who are usually superficially cooperative during therapy, firefighters don’t hold back: They hurl insults and storm out of the room. Firefighters are frantic, and if you ask them what would happen if they stopped doing their job, you discover that they believe the exiled feelings would crash the entire self-system. They are also oblivious to the idea that there are better ways to guarantee physical and emotional safety, and even if behaviors like bingeing or cutting stop, firefighters often find other methods of self-harm. These cycles will come to an end only when the Self is able to take charge and the system feels safe. The Burden of ToxicityExiles are the toxic waste dump of the system. Because they hold the memories, sensations, beliefs, and emotions associated with trauma, it is hazardous to release them. They contain the “Oh, my God, I’m done for” experience—the essence of inescapable shock—and with it, terror, collapse, and accommodation. Exiles may reveal themselves in the form of crushing physical sensations or extreme numbing, and they offend both the reasonableness of the managers and the bravado of the firefighters. Like most incest survivors, Joan hated her exiles, particularly the little girl who had responded to her abuser’s sexual demands and the terrified child who whimpered alone in her bed. When exiles overwhelm managers, they take us over—we are nothing but that rejected, weak, unloved, and abandoned child. The Self becomes “blended” with the exiles, and every possible alternative for our life is eclipsed. Then, as Schwartz points out, “We see ourselves, and the world, through their eyes and believe it is ‘the’ world. In this state it won’t occur to us that we have been hijacked.”[17]

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  “severance of the sense of connection.” The prophet’s stance over against the king nurtures adequate symbolization and therefore insists upon connectedness. 5 . Effective symbols are those that have grown out of the history of the community. Thus we are speaking not of universal myths but of symbolization appropriate to a peculiar history. In Israel we may then refer to the memories of incongruity that serve Israel through the prophecy of Jeremiah. See the provocative statement of Peter R. Ackroyd, “Continuity and Discontinuity: Rehabilitation and Authentication,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. D. A. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 215–34. There is a danger in symbols that provide continuity, for they may lessen the reality of the discontinuity; but Ackroyd has stated for Israel that which Lifton sees in terms of our own culture. 6 . The anguish and passion that make such speech authoritative cannot be in terms of comprehensive myths but must be out of the experience of the community. Thus the study of the language of metaphor and parable is to let Israel experience its own experience, as Laing has seen. On the concreteness of language, see Sallie McFague TeSelle, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge, 1988; reprint ed.); William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). It is the task of the prophet to energize the metaphors resulting from historical experience. 7 . On a quite different critical judgment of this text, see George E. Mendenhall, “The Shady Side of Wisdom: The Date and Purpose of Genesis 3,” in A Light Unto My Path: Old Testament Studies in Honor of Jacob M. Myers , ed. H. N. Bream et al. (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1974), 319–34. The dating to the exile as Mendenhall proposes, vis à vis conventional Solomonic dating, may suggest important parallels between the two periods. 8 . Thus apathy and official optimism have ideological purposes. Against that,