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.

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire. Past questioning the necessities of blood or why it must be mine or my children’s time that will see the grim city quake to be reborn perhaps blackened again but this time with a sense of purpose; tired of the past tense forever, of assertion and repetition of the ego-trips through an incomplete self where two years ago proud rang for promise but now it is time for fruit and all the agonies are barren— only the children are growing: For how else can the self become whole save by making self into its own new religion? I am bound like an old lover—a true believer— to this city’s death by accretion and slow ritual, and I submit to its penance for a trial as new steel is tried I submit my children also to its death throes and agony and they are not even the city’s past lovers. But I submit them to the harshness and growing cold to the brutalizations which if survived will teach them strength or an understanding of how strength is gotten and will not be forgotten: It will be their city then: I submit them loving them above all others save myself to the fire to the rage to the ritual scarifications to be tried as new steel is tried; and in its wasting the city shall try them as the blood-splash of a royal victim tries the hand of the destroyer. II I hide behind tenements and subways in fluorescent alleys watching as flames walk the streets of an empire’s altar raging through the veins of the sacrificial stenchpot smeared upon the east shore of a continent’s insanity conceived in the psychic twilight of murderers and pilgrims rank with money and nightmare and too many useless people who will not move over nor die, who cannot bend even before the winds of their own preservation even under the weight of their own hates Who cannot amend nor conceive nor even learn to share their own visions who bomb my children into mortar in churches and work plastic offal and metal and the flesh of their enemies into subway rush-hour temples where obscene priests finger and worship each other in secret and think they are praying when they squat to shit money-pebbles shaped like their parents’ brains— who exist to go into dust to exist again grosser and more swollen and without ever relinquishing space or breath or energy from their private hoard. I do not need to make war nor peace with these prancing and murderous deacons who refuse to recognize their role in this covenant we live upon and so have come to fear and despise even their own children; but I condemn myself, and my loves past and present and the blessed enthusiasms of all my children to this city without reason or future without hope to be tried as the new steel is tried before trusted to slaughter.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  the young men next door with their loud midnight parties and fishy rings left in the bathtub no longer arouse them from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows and who was it who married the widow that Buzzie’s son messed with? To Welfare and insult from the slow shuffle from dayswork to shopping bags heavy with leftovers Rooming houses are old women waiting searching through their darkening windows the end or beginning of agony old women seen through half-ajar doors hoping they are not waiting but being an entrance to somewhere unknown and desired and not new. Bloodbirth That which is inside of me screaming beating about for exit or entry names the wind, wanting winds’ voice wanting winds’ power it is not my heart and I am trying to tell this without art or embellishment with bits of me flying out in all directions screams memories old pieces of flesh struck off like dry bark from a felled tree, bearing up or out holding or bring forth child or demon is this birth or exorcism or the beginning machinery of myself outlining recalling my father’s business—what I must be about—my own business minding. Shall I split or be cut down by a word’s complexion or the lack of it and from what direction will the opening be made to show the true face of me lying exposed and together my children your children their children bent on our conjugating business. Martha I Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evidence of life without fire and wrapped you in an electric blanket kept ten degrees below life. Fetal hands curled inward on the icy sheets your bed was so cold the bruises could not appear. On the second day I knew you were alive because the grey flesh of your face suffered. I love you and cannot feel you less than Martha I love you and cannot split this shaved head

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  the queen was more pleased in mortifying her than grieved to find her in fault, she replied, with an air as calm and composed as that of the queen was agitated and passionate, " If you did not know your own heart, madam, I would set before you the bad feeling you have long en- tertained towards my father and me ; but you know it so well, that you will not be surprised to hear that it is not a secret for anybody. For my part, madam, I have seen and felt it to my cost. If you had been as kind to me as to those who are not so nearly related co you, I should now be married in a manner that would do honour both to you and to me ; but you have forsaken me, and not shown me the least mark of favour, so that I have massed all the good offers I have had through n.y father's negli- gence and the little account you have made of me. This unkind treatment threw me into such despair that, if my health had been strong enough to endure the austerities of a convent, I would gladly have enter'^d one to escape from the continual vexations which your harshness caused me. In the midst of this despondency I became acquainted with one who would be of as good a house as myself, if the love of two persons was as much esteemed as the matrimonial ring; for you know that his father would take precedence of mine. He has long loved and cheered me : but you, madam, who have never forgiven me the least fault, or praised any good act I may have done, though you knew by experience it was not my wont to talk of love and mundane vanities, and that I lived a more religious life than any other of your servants, you have not hesitated from the first to take offence at my speaking to a gentleman as unfortunate as myself, and in whose friendship I sought nothing else than con- solation of mind. When I saw that I was entirely de- prived of this, my despair was so great that I resolved to Third day. ] Q UEEN OF NA VA RRE. 205

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  By the light of our sacred street lamps by whatever maps we are sworn to follow pleasure will betray us unless we do what we must do without wanting to do it feel the enemy stone give way in retreat without pleasure or satisfaction we look the other way as our dreams come true as our bloody hands move over history writing we have come we have done what we came to do. Pulling down statues of rock from their high places we must level the expectation upon which they stand waiting for us to fulfill their image waiting for our feet to replace them. Unless we refuse to sleep even one night in houses of marble the sight of our children’s false pleasure will undo us for our children have grown in the shadow of what was the shape of marble between their eyes and the sun but we do not wish to stand like great marble statues between our children’s eyes and their sun. Learning all we can use only what is vital The only sacrifice of worth is the sacrifice of desire. from Between Our Selves (1976) for Frances for the embattled there is no place that cannot be home. nor is. Power The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else only the color”.

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

  It is important that we understand Bacon’s Rebellion for what it revealed: the most promising land was never equally available to all. The “Parasites” who encircled Governor Berkeley held a decided advantage. Inherited station was mediated by political connections or the good fortune of marrying into a profitable inheritance. By 1700, indentured servants no longer had much of a chance to own land. They had to move elsewhere or become tenants. The royal surveyors made sure that large planters had first bids on new, undeveloped land, and so the larger tracts were increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. Then, as more shipments of slaves arrived in the colony, these too were monopolized by the major landholding families. 76 For all their talk of loving the land, Virginians were less skilled in the art of husbandry than their English counterparts. Few ploughs were used in seventeenth-century Virginia. The simple hoe was the principal tool in the raising of tobacco, an implement that demanded considerable human labor. The majority of those who landed on American shores did not live long enough to own land, let alone to master it. Slavery was thus a logical outgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emerged from three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment of indentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breed children so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers. Waste men and waste women (and especially waste children, the adolescent boys who comprised a majority of the indentured servants) were an expendable class of laborers who made colonization possible. The so-called wasteland of colonial America might have had the makings of a New Canaan. Instead, waste people wasted away, fertilizing the soil with their labor while finding it impossible to harvest any social mobility. CHAPTER TWO John Locke’s Lubberland W The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live with less Labour than in N[orth] Carolina. It approaches nearer to the Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the Slothfulness of the People. —William Byrd II, “History of the Dividing Line” (1728) hen Americans think of the renowned English Enlightenment thinker John Locke, what comes to mind is how Thomas Jefferson tacitly borrowed his words and ideas for the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s well-known phrase “Life, Liberty and Estate” was transformed by the Virginian into “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Locke was the must-read of every educated man, woman, and child in the British American colonies.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  At least some of these false teachers denied that Jesus was the Messiah. `Who is the liar', demands John, `but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?' (i John 2:22). It is most likely that these false teachers were not Gnostics in the true sense of the word, but Jews. Things had always been difficult for Jewish Christians, but the events of history made them doubly so. It was very difficult for Jews to come to believe in a crucified Messiah. But suppose they had begun to believe this, their difficulties were by no means finished. The Christians believed that Jesus would return quickly to vindicate his people. Clearly, that would be a hope that would be specially dear to the hearts of the Jews. Then, in AD 70, Jerusalem was captured by the Romans, who were so infuriated with the long intransigence and the suicidal resistance of the Jews that they tore the holy city stone from stone and drew a plough across the middle of it. In view of that, how could the Jews easily accept the hope that Jesus would come and save them? The holy city was desolate; the Jews were dispersed throughout the world. In view of that, how could it be true that the Messiah had come? The Denial of the Incarnation There was something even more serious than that. There was false teaching which came directly from an attempt from within the Church to bring Christianity into line with Gnosticism. We must remember the Gnostic point of view that spirit alone was good and matter utterly evil. Given that point of view, any real incarnation is impossible. That is exactly what, centuries later, St Augustine was to point out. Before he became a Christian, he was skilled in the philosophies of the various schools. In the Confessions (8:9), he tells us that somewhere in the writings of the Platonists he had read in one form or another nearly all the things that Christianity says; but there was one great Christian saying which he had never found in any of these works and which no one would ever find - and that saying was: `The Word became flesh and lived among us' (John 1:14). Since these thinkers believed in the essential evil of matter and therefore the essential evil of the body, that was one thing they could never say. It is clear that the false teachers against whom John was writing in this First Letter denied the reality of the incarnation and of Jesus' physical body. `Every spirit', writes John, `that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God' (i John 4:2-3). In the early Church, this refusal to admit the reality of the incarnation took, broadly speaking, two forms.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It’s the nights after Frances goes back to the hotel that are the hardest. I spend my day racing around between those dreadful public meals and the eurhythmics and painting and baths and tests and running over to Frances’ hotel for a quick cuddle then back here for a liver compress or to take my temperature or something else equally vital in this half-seen scheme of things that feels like a pact I’ve made with myself to do as they believe is best for a stated period of time—three weeks. In other words, to give the Lukas Klinik my best shot because it is the only thing I have going for me right now, and tomorrow the results from all my liver tests and other diagnostic analyses will be back. I haven’t really thought about what they will be because I just can’t spend any more energy in being scared. What I have to fight the hardest against here is feeling that it is just not worth it—too much fight for too little return, and I hurt all the damn time. Something is going on inside me, and it’s interfering with my life. There is a persistent and pernicious despair hovering over me constantly that feels physiological, even when my basic mood is quite happy. I don’t understand it, but I do not want to slip or fall into any kind of resignation. I am not going to go gently into anybody’s damn good night! December 23, 1985, 10:30 a.m. Arlesheim I have cancer of the liver. Dr. Lorenz just came in and told me. The crystallization test and the liver sonogram are all positive. The two masses in my liver are malignant. He says I should begin an increased Iscador program and antihormone therapy right away, if I decide that is the way I want to go. Well. The last possibility of doubt based on belief is gone. I said I’d come to Lukas because I trusted the anthroposophic doctors, and if they said it was malignant then I would accept their diagnosis. So here it is, and all the yelling and head-banging isn’t going to change it. I guess it helps to finally know. I wish Frances were here. I cannot afford to waste any more time in doubting, or in fury. The question is, what do I do now? Listen to my body, of course, but the messages get dimmer and dimmer. In two weeks I go back home. Iscador or chemotherapy or both? How did I ever come to be in this place? What can I use it for? December 24, 1985 Arlesheim

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Afterimages I However the image enters its force remains within my eyes rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve wild for life, relentless and acquisitive learning to survive where there is no food my eyes are always hungry and remembering however the image enters its force remains. A white woman stands bereft and empty a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson recalled in me forever like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep etched into my visions food for dragonfish that learn to live upon whatever they must eat fused images beneath my pain. II The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson A Mississippi summer televised. Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney now awash tearless and no longer young, she holds a tattered baby’s blanket in her arms. In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain a microphone thrust up against her flat bewildered words “we jest come from the bank yestiddy borrowing money to pay the income tax now everything’s gone. I never knew it could be so hard.” Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud caked around the edges her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation unanswered she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed “hard, but not this hard.” Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her hanging upon her coat like mirrors until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside snarling “She ain’t got nothing more to say!” and that lie hangs in his mouth like a shred of rotting meat.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Past questioning the necessities of blood or why it must be mine or my children’s time that will see the grim city quake to be reborn perhaps blackened again but this time with a sense of purpose; tired of the past tense forever, of assertion and repetition of the ego-trips through an incomplete self where two years ago proud rang for promise but now it is time for fruit and all the agonies are barren— only the children are growing: For how else can the self become whole save by making self into its own new religion? I am bound like an old lover—a true believer— to this city’s death by accretion and slow ritual, and I submit to its penance for a trial as new steel is tried I submit my children also to its death throes and agony and they are not even the city’s past lovers. But I submit them to the harshness and growing cold to the brutalizations which if survived will teach them strength or an understanding of how strength is gotten and will not be forgotten: It will be their city then: I submit them loving them above all others save myself to the fire to the rage to the ritual scarifications to be tried as new steel is tried; and in its wasting the city shall try them as the blood-splash of a royal victim tries the hand of the destroyer. II I hide behind tenements and subways in fluorescent alleys watching as flames walk the streets of an empire’s altar raging through the veins of the sacrificial stenchpot smeared upon the east shore of a continent’s insanity conceived in the psychic twilight of murderers and pilgrims rank with money and nightmare and too many useless people who will not move over nor die, who cannot bend even before the winds of their own preservation even under the weight of their own hates Who cannot amend nor conceive nor even learn to share their own visions who bomb my children into mortar in churches and work plastic offal and metal and the flesh of their enemies into subway rush-hour temples where obscene priests finger and worship each other in secret and think they are praying when they squat to shit money-pebbles shaped like their parents’ brains— who exist to go into dust to exist again grosser and more swollen and without ever relinquishing space or breath or energy from their private hoard.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Humility lies in the face of history I have forgiven myself for him for the white meat we all consumed in secret before we were born we shared the same meal. When you impale me upon your lances of narrow blackness before you hear my heart speak mourn your own borrowed blood your own borrowed visions Do not mistake my flesh for the enemy do not write my name in the dust before the shrine of the god of smallpox for we are all children of Eshu god of chance and the unpredictable and we each wear many changes inside of our skin. Armed with scars healed in many different colors I look in my own faces as Eshu’s daughter crying if we do not stop killing the other in ourselves the self that we hate in others soon we shall all lie in the same direction and Eshidale’s priests will be very busy they who alone can bury all those who seek their own death by jumping up from the ground and landing upon their heads. from Chosen Poems: Old and New (1982) T O F RANCES L OUISE C LAYTON our footsteps hold this place together our decisions make the possible whole. The Evening News First rule of the road: attend quiet victims first. I am kneading my bread Winnie Mandela while children who sing in the streets of Soweto are jailed for inciting to riot the moon in Soweto is mad is bleeding my sister into the earth is mixing her seed with the vultures’ greeks reap her like olives out of the trees she is skimmed like salt from the skin of a hungry desert while the Ganvie fisherwomen with milk-large breasts hide a fish with the face of a small girl in the prow of their boats. Winnie Mandela I am feeling your face with pain of my crippled fingers our children are escaping their births in the streets of Soweto and Brooklyn (what does it mean our wars being fought by our children?) Winnie Mandela our names are like olives, salt, sand the opal, amber, obsidian that hide their shape well. We have never touched shaven foreheads together yet how many of our sisters’ and daughters’ bones whiten in secret whose names we have not yet spoken whose names we have never spoken I have never heard their names spoken. Second rule of the road: any wound will stop bleeding if you press down hard enough .

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  going down for the third time stuck​in the particular You cannot make love to concrete if you care about being non-essential​wrong or worn​thin if you fear ever becoming diamonds or lard you cannot make love to concrete if you cannot pretend concrete needs your loving To make love to concrete you need an indelible feather white dresses before you are ten a confirmation lace veil​milk-large bones and air raid drills in your nightmares no stars till you go to the country and one summer when you are twelve Con Edison pulls the plug on the street-corner moons​Walpurgisnacht and there are sudden new lights in the sky stone chips that forget​you need to become a light rope​a hammer a repeatable bridge garden-fresh broccoli​two dozen dropped eggs and a hint of you Thaw The language of past seasons collapses​pumpkins in spring false labor slides like mud off the face of ease and whatever I turn my hand to pales in the sun. We will always be there to your call the old witches said always said​always saying something else​at the same time you are trapped​asleep you are speechless perhaps​you will also be broken. Step lightly​all around us words are cracking off​we drift separate and syllabic if we survive at all. Inheritance—His I My face resembles your face less and less each day. When I was young no one mistook whose child I was. Features​build​coloring alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters marked me Byron’s daughter. No sun set when you died, but a door opened onto my mother. After you left she grieved her crumpled world aloft an iron fist sweated with business symbols a printed blotter​dwell in a house of Lord’s your hollow voice chanting down a hospital corridor yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. II I rummage through the deaths you lived swaying on a bridge of question. At seven​in Barbados dropped into your unknown father’s life your courage vault from his tailor’s table back to the sea Did the Grenada treeferns sing your 15th summer as you jumped ship to seek your mother finding her​too late surrounded with new sons? Who did you bury to become enforcer of the law the handsome legend before whose raised arm even trees wept a man of deep and wordless passion who wanted sons and got five girls? You left the first two scratching in a treefern’s shade the youngest is a renegade poet searching for your answer in my blood. My mother’s Grenville tales spin through early summer evenings. But you refused to speak of home of stepping proud Black and penniless into this land where only white men ruled by money.​How you labored in the docks of the Hotel Astor your bright wife a chambermaid upstairs welded love and survival to ambition as the land of promise withered crashed​the hotel closed and you peddle dawn-bought apples from a pushcart on Broadway. Does an image of return wealthy and triumphant

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  no Martha I do not know if we shall ever sleep in each other’s arms again. III It is the middle of August and you are alive to discomfort. You have been moved into a utility room across the hall from the critical ward because your screaming disturbs the other patients your beside table has been moved also which means you will be there for a while a favorite now with the floor nurses who put up a sign on the utility room door I’M MARTHA HERE DO NOT FORGET ME PLEASE KNOCK. A golden attendant named Sukie bathes you as you proposition her she is very pretty and very gentle. The frontal lobe of the brain governs inhibitions the damage is after all slight and they say the screaming will pass. Your daughter Dorrie promises you will be as good as new, Mama who only wants to be Bad as the old. I want some truth good hard truth a sign of youth we were all young once we had a good thing going now I’m making a plan for a dead rabbit a rare rabbit. I am dying goddammit dying am I Dying? Death is a word you can say now pain is mortal I am dying dying for god’s sake won’t someone please get me a doctor PLEASE your screams beat against our faces as you yell begging relief from the blank cruelty of a thousand nurses. A moment of silence breaks as you accumulate fresh sorrows then through your pain-fired face you slip me a wink Martha Winked. Your face straightens into impatience with the loads of shit you are handed ‘You’re doing just fine Martha what time is it Martha’ ‘What did you have for supper tonight Martha’ testing testing whoever passes for Martha you weary of it. All the people you must straighten out pass your bedside in the utility room bringing you cookies and hoping you will be kinder than they were. Go away Mama and Bubie for 30 years you made me believe I was shit you shat out for the asking but I’m not and you’d better believe it right now would you kindly stop rubbing my legs and GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. Next week the Bubie brings Teglach your old favorite and will you be kinder Martha than we were to the shell the cocoon out of which the you is emerging? IV No one you were can come so close to death without dying into another Martha. I await you as we all await her fearing her honesty fearing we may neither love nor dismiss Martha with the dross burned away fearing condemnation from the essential. You cannot get closer to death than this Martha the nearest you’ve come to living yourself Sowing It is the sink of the afternoon the children asleep or weary. I have finished planting the tomatoes in this brief sun after four days of rain

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  There was this present age, which is wholly bad and beyond redemption. For it, there can be nothing but total destruction. The Jews, therefore, waited for the end of things as they are. There was the age which is to come, which was to be wholly good, the golden age of God, in which would be peace, prosperity and righteousness, and the place of God's chosen people would at last be upheld as theirs by right. How was this present age to become the age which is to come? The Jews believed that the change could never be brought about by human agency and, therefore, looked for the direct intervention of God. He would come striding on to the stage of history to blast this present world out of existence and bring in his golden time. The day of the coming of God was called the day of the Lord and was to be a terrible time of fear and destruction and judgment, which would be the signs of the coming new age. All apocalyptic literature deals with these events - the sin of the present age, the terrors of the time between, and the blessings of the time to come. It is entirely composed of dreams and visions of the end. That means that all apocalyptic literature is inevitably cryptic. It is continually attempting to describe the indescribable, to say the unsayable and to paint the unpaintable. This is further complicated by another fact. It was only natural that these apocalyptic visions should flame the more brightly in the minds of people living under tyranny and oppression. The more some alien power held them down, the more they dreamed of the destruction of that power and of their own recognition and restoration. But it would only have worsened the situation if the oppressing power could have understood these dreams. Such writings would have seemed the works of rebellious revolutionaries. These books, therefore, were frequently written in code, deliberately couched in language which was unintelligible to the outsider; and inevitably there are many cases in which they remain unintelligible because the key to the code no longer exists. But the more we know about the historical background of such books, the better we can interpret them. The Book of Revelation All this is the precise picture of our Revelation. There are any number of Jewish apocalypses - Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Baruch, 4 Ezra. Our Revelation is a Christian apocalypse. It is the only one in the New Testament, although there were many other similar writings which did not gain admission. It is written exactly on the Jewish pattern and follows the basic idea of the two ages.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Boys burst from the raised loins twisting and shouting from the bush secret they run beating the other women avoiding the sweet flesh hidden near their mother’s fire but they must take her blood as a token the wild trees have warned them beat her and you will be free on the third day they creep up to her cooking pot bubbling over the evening’s fire and she feeds them yam soup and silence. “Let us sleep in your bed” they whisper “Let us sleep in your bed” they whisper “Let us sleep in your bed” but she has mothered before them. She closes her door. They become men. Chain News item: Two girls, fifteen and sixteen, were sent to foster homes, because they had borne children by their natural father. Later, they petitioned the New York courts to be returned to their parents, who, the girls said, loved them. And the courts did so. I Faces surround me that have no smell or color no time only strange laughing testaments vomiting promise like love but look at the skeleton children advancing against us beneath their faces there is no sunlight no darkness no heart remains no legends to bring them back as women into their bodies at dawn. Look at the skeleton children advancing against us we will find womanhood in their eyes as they cry which of you bore me will love me will claim my blindness as yours and which of you marches to battle from between my legs? II On the porch outside my door girls are lying like felled maples in the path of my feet I cannot step past them nor over them their slim bodies roll like smooth tree trunks repeating themselves over and over until my porch is covered with the bodies of young girls. Some have a child in their arms. To what death shall I look for comfort? Which mirror to break or mourn? Two girls repeat themselves in my doorway their eyes are not stone. Their flesh is not wood nor steel but I can not touch them. Shall I warn them of night or offer them bread or a song? They are sisters. Their father has known them over and over. The twins they carry are his. Whose death shall we mourn in the forest unburied? Winter has come and the children are dying.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I’m going to make a new healing necklace for myself from them while I’m here, and I’m going to make the heart-piece from carnelian, which is a specific against melancholy. And that’s my answer to Sister Marie’s cautioning me against the dangers of an excess of joy! It’s the nights after Frances goes back to the hotel that are the hardest. I spend my day racing around between those dreadful public meals and the eurhythmics and painting and baths and tests and running over to Frances’ hotel for a quick cuddle then back here for a liver compress or to take my temperature or something else equally vital in this half-seen scheme of things that feels like a pact I’ve made with myself to do as they believe is best for a stated period of time—three weeks. In other words, to give the Lukas Klinik my best shot because it is the only thing I have going for me right now, and tomorrow the results from all my liver tests and other diagnostic analyses will be back. I haven’t really thought about what they will be because I just can’t spend any more energy in being scared. What I have to fight the hardest against here is feeling that it is just not worth it—too much fight for too little return, and I hurt all the damn time. Something is going on inside me, and it’s interfering with my life. There is a persistent and pernicious despair hovering over me constantly that feels physiological, even when my basic mood is quite happy. I don’t understand it, but I do not want to slip or fall into any kind of resignation. I am not going to go gently into anybody’s damn good night! December 23, 1985, 10:30 a.m. Arlesheim I have cancer of the liver. Dr. Lorenz just came in and told me. The crystallization test and the liver sonogram are all positive. The two masses in my liver are malignant. He says I should begin an increased Iscador program and antihormone therapy right away, if I decide that is the way I want to go. Well. The last possibility of doubt based on belief is gone. I said I’d come to Lukas because I trusted the anthroposophic doctors, and if they said it was malignant then I would accept their diagnosis. So here it is, and all the yelling and head-banging isn’t going to change it. I guess it helps to finally know. I wish Frances were here. I cannot afford to waste any more time in doubting, or in fury. The question is, what do I do now? Listen to my body, of course, but the messages get dimmer and dimmer. In two weeks I go back home. Iscador or chemotherapy or both? How did I ever come to be in this place? What can I use it for? December 24, 1985 Arlesheim I feel trapped on a lonely star.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  November 18, 1986 New York City Despair and isolation are my greatest internal enemies. I need to remember I am not alone, even when it feels that way. Now more than ever it is time to put my solitary ways behind me, even while protecting my solitude. “Help is on the way,” Margareta said, her fingers moving over the Tarot deck in a farewell gesture. I need to identify that help and use it whenever I can. Five million people in the U.S.—or 2 percent of the population of this country—are actively living with cancer. If you apply that percentage to the Black community—where it is probably higher because of the rising incidence of cancers without a corresponding rise in the cure rate—if we take that percentage into the Black population of 22 million, then every single day there are at least half a million Black people in the U.S. shopping in supermarkets, catching subways, grooming mules, objecting in PTA meetings, standing in a welfare line, teaching Sunday school, walking in the streets at noon looking for work, scrubbing a kitchen floor, all carrying within our bodies the seeds of a destruction not of our own choosing. It is a destruction we can keep from defining our living for as long as possible, if not our dying. Each one of us must define for ourselves what substance and shape we wish to give the life we have left. November 19, 1986 New York City Evil never appears in its own face to bargain, nor does impotence, nor does despair. After all, who believes any more in the devil buying up souls, anyway? But I warn myself, don’t even pretend not to say no, loudly and often, no matter how symbolically. Because the choices presented in our lives are never simple or fable-clear. Survival never presents itself as “do this particular thing precisely as directed and you will go on living. Don’t do that and no question about it you will surely die.” Despite what the doctor said, it just doesn’t happen that way. Probably in some ideal world we would be offered distinct choices, where we make our decisions from a clearly typed and annotated menu. But no life for any Black woman I know is that simple or that banal. There are as many crucial, untimed decisions to be made as there are dots in a newspaper photo of great contrast, and as we get close enough to examine them within their own terrain, the whole picture becomes distorted and obscure. I do not think about my death as being imminent, but I live my days against a background noise of mortality and constant uncertainty. Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Two-thirds of the children grew up in families where they experienced multiple divorces and remarriages of one or both of their parents. Such figures don’t capture the many cohabitations and brief love affairs that never become legal relationships. Given this experience, can we be surprised that so many children of divorce conclude that love is fleeting? Ghosts of Childhood WHEN I TURNED to the notes of my interview with Karen fifteen years after her parents’ divorce, the image of a young woman crying inconsolably entered my mind. Karen was sitting on the sofa in my old office, with her chin in her hands and elbows on her knees, telling me about her live-in relationship with her boyfriend Nick. “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said, twisting a damp tissue into the shape of a rope. “I can’t believe I’ve gotten myself into this. I never should have done it. It’s like my worst nightmare come to life. It’s what I grew up dreading most and look what happened.” Karen gripped her fingers tightly until her knuckles shone like moons. “What’s wrong?” I asked, as gently as I could. “Everything,” she moaned. “He drinks beer. He has no ambition, no life goals, no education, no regular job. He’s going nowhere. When I come home after work, he’s just sitting there in front of the TV and that’s where he’s been all day.” Then Karen’s voice dropped. “But he loves me,” she said in anguish. “He would be devastated if I ever left him.” Even in her great distress and anger she was intensely cognizant of her boyfriend’s suffering. I thought to myself, this epitomizes Karen—she’s always aware of other people’s hurts and suffering. “But then why did you move in with him?” “I’m not sure. I knew I didn’t love him. But I was scared of marriage. I was scared of divorce, and I’m terrified of being alone. Look, you can hope for love but you can’t expect it! When Nick asked me to live with him, I was afraid that I’d get older and that I wouldn’t have another chance. I kept thinking that I’d end up lonely like my dad. And Mom.” I looked at this beautiful young woman and shook my head in disbelief. Could she really think that shacking up with a man she didn’t love was all she could hope for? Karen must have read my mind because she quickly said, “I know. People have been telling me how pretty I am since I was a child. But I don’t believe it. And I don’t care. Looks were always important to my mother. She wears tons of makeup and dresses like a model. I thought she was silly and still do.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents. Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one’s eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers and speech more or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine. Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother’s birthday, in late summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I received. All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I’d like to say that we’re at a crossroads but I’m afraid I can’t be that optimistic. We can choose a new route only if we agree on where we are and where we want to be in the future. The outlook is cloudy. For every person who wants to sound an alarm, there’s another who says don’t worry. For everyone concerned about the economic and emotional deprivations inherited by children of divorce there are those who argue that those kids were “in trouble before” and that divorce is irrelevant, no big deal. People want to feel good about their choices. Doubtless many do. In actual fact, after most divorces, one member of the former couple feels much better while the other feels no better or even worse. Yet at any dinner party you will still hear the same myths: Divorce is a temporary crisis. So many children have experienced their parents’ divorce that kids nowadays don’t worry so much. It’s easier. They almost expect it. It’s a rite of passage. If I feel better, so will my children. And so on. As always, children are voiceless or unheard. But family scholars who have not always seen eye to eye are converging on a number of findings that fly in the face of our cherished myths. We agree that the effects of divorce are long-term. We know that the family is in trouble. We have a consensus that children raised in divorced or remarried families are less well adjusted as adults than those raised in intact families. The life histories of this first generation to grow up in a divorce culture tell us truths we dare not ignore. Their message is poignant, clear, and contrary to what so many want to believe. They have taught me the following: From the viewpoint of the children, and counter to what happens to their parents, divorce is a cumulative experience. Its impact increases over time and rises to a crescendo in adulthood. At each developmental stage divorce is experienced anew in different ways. In adulthood it affects personality, the ability to trust, expectations about relationships, and ability to cope with change.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  The Jews could not forget that they were the chosen people of God. To them, that involved the certainty that some day they would arrive at world supremacy. In their early history, they looked forward to the coming of a king of David's line who would unite the nation and lead them to greatness. A shoot was to come forth from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah God would raise up a righteous branch for David (Jeremiah 23:5). Some day, the people would serve David, their king (Jeremiah 30:9). David would be their shepherd and their king (Ezekiel 34:23, 37:24). The booth of David would be repaired (Amos 9:11); out of Bethlehem there would come a ruler who would be great to the ends of the earth (Micah 5:2-4). But the whole history of Israel contradicted these hopes. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom - small enough to begin with - split into two under Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and so lost its unity. The northern kingdom, with its capital at Samaria, vanished in the last quarter of the eighth century Bc before the assault of the Assyrians, never again reappeared in history and is now referred to as the lost ten tribes. The southern kingdom, with its capital at Jerusalem, was reduced to slavery and exile by the Babylonians in the early part of the sixth century BC. It later came under the rule of the Persians, the Greeks and finally the Romans. History for the Jews was a catalogue of disasters from which it became clear that no human deliverer could rescue them. The Two Ages Jewish thought stubbornly held to the conviction of the chosenness of the Jews but had to adjust itself to the facts of history. It did so by working out a scheme of history. The Jews divided all time into two ages. There was this present age, which is wholly bad and beyond redemption. For it, there can be nothing but total destruction. The Jews, therefore, waited for the end of things as they are. There was the age which is to come, which was to be wholly good, the golden age of God, in which would be peace, prosperity and righteousness, and the place of God's chosen people would at last be upheld as theirs by right. How was this present age to become the age which is to come? The Jews believed that the change could never be brought about by human agency and, therefore, looked for the direct intervention of God. He would come striding on to the stage of history to blast this present world out of existence and bring in his golden time. The day of the coming of God was called the day of the Lord and was to be a terrible time of fear and destruction and judgment, which would be the signs of the coming new age.