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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “Well, I told them people I got plenty of cars, plenty of cars.” He spoke emphatically, with much more excitement than I’d heard from him in a while. “All different colors, shapes, and sizes. The man say, ‘Your cars don’t work.’ I told him my cars do work, too.” He looked at me. “You may have to talk to that man about my cars, okay?” I nodded and thought of his field of metal. “You do have lots of cars—” “I know!” He cut me off and started laughing. “See, I told them people, but they didn’t believe me. I told them.” He was smiling and chuckling now, but he looked confused and not himself. “Them people think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I know exactly what I’m talking about.” He spoke defiantly. We reached his room, and he sat down on his bed while I pulled up a chair. He became still and quiet and suddenly looked very worried. “Well, it looks like I’m back here,” he said with a heavy sigh. “They done put me back on death row.” His voice was mournful. “I tried, I tried, I tried, but they just won’t let me be.” He looked me in the eye. “Why they want to do somebody like they’re doing me is something I’ll never understand. Why are people like that? I mind my own business. I don’t hurt nobody. I try to do right, and no matter what I do, people come along, put me right back on death row…for nothing. Nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” He was becoming agitated so I put my hand on his arm. “Hey, it’s okay,” I said as gently as I could. “It’s not as bad as it seems. I think—” “You’re going to get me out, right? You’re going to get me off the row again?” “Walter, this isn’t the row. You haven’t been feeling well, and so you’re here so you can get better. This is a hospital.” “They’ve got me again, and you’ve got to help me.” He was starting to panic, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then he started crying. “Please get me out of here. Please? They’re going to execute me for no good reason, and I don’t want to die in no electric chair.” He was crying now with a forcefulness that alarmed me. I moved to the bed next to him and put my arm around him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Walter, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  putting on the braces and dragging myself around the yard less and less, feeling depressed and spending more time getting drunk at Arthur’s Bar. One night in late August I came home very drunk and pushed myself back into my house, up the wooden ramp my father had built when I was at the hospital. I pushed my wheelchair down the hallway to my room, trying not to wake my mother and father or any of my brothers and sisters. When I got there, I sat in my wheelchair staring at myself in the mirror for a long time, thinking back to the promise I had made to myself and the others in the Bronx VA hospital that I would walk again. I had not taken my braces out of the closet or tried to walk in several months, but on that night I was determined to get up again. Sometime after midnight, I took the braces out of the closet, transferred into my bed, and put the braces on, locking them in place. I then transferred back into my wheelchair, grabbed my crutches, and lifted myself slowly out of my chair into an upright position. After taking a deep drunken breath, I began to stubbornly drag myself around the room. I had only gone a few steps when I found myself facing the mirror once again. I remember staring at my twisted and atrophied body and with one last superhuman effort, refusing to be defeated, I spun around angrily, dragging myself across the floor of my room. After several steps I lost my balance and went crashing to the floor. I thought for a moment of getting up again, of making one last vain attempt to walk, but I was too tired and drunk and instead I began to cry, tears streaming down my face, hoping my mother and father wouldn’t hear me. A few minutes later I pulled myself back into my wheelchair where I slowly unstrapped my braces and threw them into the closet. I know the truth is that someday they will find a way to fuse the spine together, but not in my lifetime or the lifetime of the others around me. Our job here is to keep on living, to keep getting up and making it through each day any way we can. END OF EXCERPT

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Some dysfunctional relationships, marriages, and families are essentially mini-cults of a few people. I’ve learned that many domestic abuse victims were forced into a nearly totally dependent relationship, often kept away from family and friends who might be critical of the controlling partner’s behavior. Some people were not allowed to have access to money, to learn how to drive a car, or to work outside the home. Whenever they tried to communicate their wants or needs, they were beaten. They were made to feel that any problem in their marriage was entirely their fault, and that if they only worked harder to please their spouse, everything would be fine. These people’s self-esteem became so low that they came to believe there was no future for them without their partner. Some people had spouses who planted phobias in their minds, so they could never leave the marriage; in some cases, they were also told that they would be hunted down and killed if they ever left. Some controllers threatened to kill themselves if their victim ever left. Asking Questions: The Key To Protecting Yourself Learning to be an educated consumer can help save you time, energy and money. In the case of destructive cults, being an educated consumer can help protect your mind and possibly save your life. Thorough online research is your best first option. However, if you are ever approached by someone who tries to pry information out of you or invites you to participate in a program, you can ask some very specific questions which will help you avoid over 90% of cult recruiters. Simply asking these assertively will help you deflect recruiters, who will quickly realize that you are not a promising use of their time. These questions work best if you ask them in a very direct yet friendly manner, and demand very specific answers. Although most cults use deception while recruiting, most cult members don’t realize that they are lying to potential new members. By asking these direct questions one after another, you can usually discover that either 1) you are not being told a straight story, or 2) the person doesn’t have the straight story to begin with. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses recruit by asking people if they would like to study the Bible with them. But what they do not say is that they use the New World Translation, published by the Watchtower, which is not accepted by Biblical scholars outside the cult. Of course, they have been told it is a better translation than all other Bibles.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  There was no excuse for him to have shot someone, but it didn’t make sense to kill him. I began to get angry about it. Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right? I tried not to let Mr. Dill hear me crying. I tried not to show him that he was breaking my heart. He finally got his words out. “Mr. Bryan, I just want to thank you for fighting for me. I thank you for caring about me. I love y’all for trying to save me.” When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. For the first time I realized that my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. I looked at my computer and at the calendar on the wall. I looked again around my office at the stacks of files. I saw the list of our staff, which had grown to nearly forty people. And before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  When I lay on my bed to take my nap, my body felt dense and heavy, as though it would be very hard to move again, which was just as well, since I didn’t feel like moving. When Donna banged on my door and yelled “Dinner!” I didn’t answer. She put her head in and asked if I was asleep, and I told her I didn’t feel like eating. I felt so inert, I thought I’d go to sleep, but I couldn’t. I lay awake through the sounds of argument and TV and everybody going to the bathroom. Bedtime came, drawers rasped open and shut, doors slammed, my father eased into sleep with radio mumble. The orange digits on my clock said 1:30. I thought: I should get out of this panty hose and slip. I sat up and looked out into the gray, cold street. The shrubbery on the lawn across the street looked frozen and miserable. I thought about the period of time a year before when I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking that someone was going to break into the house and kill everybody. Eventually that fear went away and I went back to sleeping again. I lay back down without taking off my clothes, and pulled a light blanket tightly around me. Sooner or later, I thought, I would sleep. I would just have to wait. But I didn’t sleep, although I became mentally incoherent for long, ugly stretches of time. Hours went by; the room turned gray. I heard the morning noises: the toilet, the coughing, Donna’s hostile muttering. Often, in the past, I had woken early and lain in bed listening to my family clumsily trying to organize itself for the day. Often as not, their sounds made me feel irrational loathing. This morning, I felt despair and a longing for them, and a sureness that we would never be close as long as I lived. My nasal passages became active with tears that didn’t reach my eyes. My mother knocked on the door. “Honey, aren’t you going to be late?” “I’m not going to work. I feel sick. I’ll call in.” “I’ll do it for you, just stay in bed.” “No, I’m going to call. It has to be me.” I didn’t call in. The lawyer didn’t call the house. I didn’t go in or call the next day or the day after that. The lawyer still didn’t call. I was slightly hurt by his absent phone call, but my relief was far greater than my hurt. After I’d stayed home for four days, my father asked if I wasn’t worried about taking so much time off. I told him I’d quit, in front of Donna and my mother. He was dumbfounded. “That wasn’t very smart,” he said. “What are you going to do now?”

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Sebastos, however, does not mean the “Worshiping One,” but the “Worshipful One,” and Theos Sebastos means the “God Who Is to Be Worshiped.” Amid all the ancient gods and goddesses that crowd Olympus, Augustus is not some Johnny-come-lately god, but the one who (above all others?) is to be worshiped. All other divinized mortals, said Horace to Augustus, achieved that status only after death but, “Upon you…while still among us, we already bestow honors, set up altars to swear by in your name, and confess that nothing like you will arise after you or has arisen before you” (Epistles 2.1:12–17). Roman imperial theology had no problem with a human being who was, on the one hand, Son of God and, on the other, God Incarnate. It also never imagined convening a council—at Nicea maybe?—to decide how a person could be at the same time fully human and fully divine. Roman theologians—poets and artists all—would have scorned any submission of Roman theology to Greek philosophy. And so did Paul for Christian theology in 1 Corinthians 1–4. We already have our first and most fundamental insight into Roman imperial theology from that single inscription. It is, of course, centered on and incarnated in the divine ruler. But titles such as Son of God or God Incarnate depend on that first title of Imperator, so that it must always come first. If Paul looked up, for example, as he passed through the southeastern gate of the public forum of Ephesus, the first word he would have seen on its dedicatory inscription was the abbreviation IMP, “to the Imperator as the All-Conquering One.” That Priene inscription says nothing about peace. It simply presumed and emphasized that Caesar’s transcendental titles—Son of God and God Incarnate—derived from and depended upon that first—and it was always first—title of Imperator as World Conqueror. What sort of peace derived from and was incarnated in such a divine conqueror? FROM TENT SITE TO TEMPLE WALL In the middle of the first century BCE, almost a century of bitter social unrest and venomous class warfare had degenerated into Rome’s worst nightmare, a terrible civil war with legionary forces on both sides. It looked like it was all over. Rome was doomed, the Roman Empire was finished, and, in the horrors of its dissolution, it would destroy the Mediterranean world. In his contemporary Epodes Horace asked, “Does some blind frenzy drive us on, or some stronger power, or guilt?” (7.13–14). Does Rome’s inaugural and fratricidal murder of Remus by Romulus mean that “a bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the crime of a brother’s murder…be a curse upon posterity”? (7.17–20). Now, he said, “a second generation is being ground to pieces by civil war, and Rome through her own strength is tottering” (16.1–2). Maybe Rome, “this selfsame city we ourselves shall ruin, we, an impious generation, of stock accurst,” until wild animals and wilder barbarians will wander through “the ashes of our city” (16.9–12).

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  To recap: sex is bad a lot. The badness of sex often stems from the ritual neglect of our own desires and sensations, because that’s how we’ve been socialized. We feel bad about this badness because popular media has convinced us that everyone is having more and better sex than we are, and that synchronized orgasm is standard after seven seconds of penis-in-hole intercourse. We are burned out—on sex and everything else—and we don’t even care that much, because how could we, when the world is crumbling down around us? Anhedonia, the clinical inability to experience pleasure, is on the rise. The media is oversexed yet we are over sex. We’ve refused to take the recycling out for weeks because we cannot bear the thought of doing an activity. If this all rings depressing to you, that’s because it is. There are, however, glimmers of hope. One glimmer is the growing number of sex psychologists, coaches, and educators emerging in the relatively new field of sex therapy. This is fantastic news for people with the cash to outsource sexual problem-solving, and still pretty good news for the rest of us: many of the tools and exercises used in sessions are seeping into the popular consciousness—at a glacial pace, but a pace nonetheless. In 2019, for example, Teen Vogue published an in-depth guide to anal sex and the requisite preparations. The only sex-adjacent awareness-building I recall from the magazines of my girlhood is just page after page of humiliating reader-submitted stories about periods—girls getting their period on their crush’s back during a flirty piggyback ride, girls getting their period during gym class (swim unit), girls getting their period on their crush’s back during gym class (swim unit). My aim for this book is to illuminate some of the more promising practices within the field of sex therapy that help treat, or at least investigate, sexual dissatisfaction, both within relationships and outside of them. One tool that is near and dear to my heart? Taking sex off the table entirely. Given that so many of us are sex-recessing already, why don’t we congratulate ourselves for what we were already doing? To consciously sex-recess, we need to understand why we’re having sex in the first place. A couple years after returning from Croatia, and for years, I slept with a male acquaintance quarterly, even though he was rude to me and the sex was obnoxious: he choked without asking (a theme) and kissed like a vacuum. I had vowed to stop, but how could I when I didn’t understand why I was doing it? I knew our irregular, emotionally confusing hookups would lead to nothing, and I wanted something—but what? The hooking up felt okay in the moment, dreamy right after (were we together??), and then terrible after the right after. When enough time passed after the terrible, I would reactivate the cycle, my memory effectively wiped.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  wanted to know how I was. Okay, I told her. She said she had been feeling kind of low and just wanted to check with me, make sure I felt good about everything. It was such a big step. Were Dwight and I getting along all right? I said we were. He was in the living room with me, painting some chairs, but I probably would have given the same answer if I’d been alone. My mother told me she could still change her mind. She could keep her job and find another place to live. I understood, didn’t I, that it wasn’t too late? I said I did, but I didn’t. I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink. After my mother hung up, Dwight and I finished painting the dining-room chairs. Then he lit a cigarette and looked around, his brush still in his hands. He gazed pensively at the piano. He said, “Sort of stands out, doesn’t it?” I looked at it with him. It was an old Baldwin upright, cased in black walnut, that he had bought for twenty dollars from a family on the move who’d grown tired of hauling it around. Dwight did a victory dance after bringing it home. He said the stupid compones had no idea what it was worth, that it was worth twice that much. Dwight sat down at it one night with the idea of demonstrating his virtuosity, but after making a few sour chords he slammed it shut and pronounced it out of tune. He never went near it again. Sometimes Pearl banged out “Chopsticks” but otherwise it got no play at all. It was just a piece of furniture, so dark in all this whiteness that it seemed to be pulsing. You really couldn’t look anywhere else. I agreed that it stood out. We went to work on it. Using fine bristles so our brush strokes wouldn’t show, we painted the bench, the pedestal, the fluted columns that rose from the pedestal to the keyboard. We painted the carved scrollwork. We painted the

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  While they take an important first step, Brooks, Craig and Fitzpatrick ignore a critical aspect of the MLM phenomenon. What they don’t report is how some MLM recruiters deceptively recruit and keep people dependent and obedient by following the BITE model. New recruits are pressured to attend rallies and conferences where they are influenced to buy materials, such as books and CDs; to keep a positive, unquestioning mental attitude; and most importantly not to give in to family and concerned friends who raise questions. They are told to never talk negatively about the company and, if they have questions, to ask only their recruiter, known as their “upline.” The cost of involvement, unless the person is in the top one percent of earners, is very high, in part because their earnings are so low. Bank accounts are drained, marriages are strained and broken. Relationships with family and friends can end up in tatters. People often wind up leaving the group, ashamed, embarrassed, depressed and sometimes even suicidal. These groups should not be in business. It is up to our government to make sure the public is protected. Until that time, caveat emptor: let the buyer beware. Cults And Religious Freedom The major defense that cults use whenever any criticism is directed against them is that it is an attack on their right to freedom of religious belief. This right is one of the most fundamental principles recognized by law and it has been memorialized in every major international covenant concerning human rights. When pilgrims were fleeing persecution in Europe and elsewhere, they sought refuge in the U.S. to practice their beliefs without government suppression. The Founding Fathers were wise to put freedom of religious belief in the very First Amendment of the Constitution. It is that important. The strong legal protection afforded to freedom of religion refers to religious beliefs. It does not necessarily protect behaviors. For example, human sacrifice to the gods may be part of a person’s belief system, as it was in earlier times, but if carried out in modern-day Boston or anywhere in the U.S., it is homicide. Courts have routinely banned snake-handling rituals, because of the many deaths that have resulted from that practice. It has famously been said, by judges and others, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”219 The U.S. Constitution emphasizes the individual’s right to freedom of speech but it, too, has limits. The law does not allow me to take a bullhorn at 3 o’clock in the morning and wake my neighbors with religious or any other kind of speech. In fact, the law may regulate the content of speech under what is called the “clear and present danger” doctrine. Speech that is designed or likely to cause a riot or serious harm to other people is not given protection. Religion does not enjoy immunity from these legal limitations.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art? “There’s a lot of other things I’d like to do too,” he said with odd self-righteousness. “But I don’t think you could handle it.” “It’s not a question of handling it.” She said these last two words very sarcastically. “So far everything you’ve said to me has been incredibly banal. You haven’t presented anything in a way that’s even remotely attractive.” She sounded like a prim, prematurely adult child complaining to her teacher about someone putting a worm down her back. He felt like an idiot. How had he gotten stuck with this prissy, reedy-voiced thing with a huge forehead who poked and picked over everything that came out of his mouth? He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear. What had he had in mind when he brought this girl here, anyway? Her serious, desperate face, panicked and tear-stained. Her ridiculous air of sacrifice and abandonment as he spread-eagled and bound her. White skin that marked easily. Frightened eyes. An exposed personality that could be yanked from her and held out of reach like...oh, he could see it only in scraps; his imagination fumbled and lost its grip. He looked at her hatefully self-possessed, compact little form. He pushed her roughly. “Oh, I’d do anything with you,” he mimicked. “You would not.” She rolled away on her side, her body curled tightly. He felt her trembling. She sniffed. “Don’t tell me I’ve broken your heart.” She continued crying. “This isn’t bothering me at all,” he said. “In fact, I’m rather enjoying it.” The trembling stopped. She sniffed once, turned on her back and looked at him with puzzled eyes. She blinked. He suddenly felt tired. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her. He looked around the room until he saw a light wood stick that his grandmother had for some reason left standing in the corner. He pointed at it. “Get me that stick. I want to beat you with it.” “I don’t want to.” “Get it. I want to humiliate you even more.” She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm. She held the blanket up to her chin. “Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me beat you. I’d be much nicer after I beat you.” “I don’t think you’re capable of being as nice as you’d have to be to interest me at this point.” “All right. I’ll get it myself.” He got the stick and snatched the blanket from her body.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Nor did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her; she took to the air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn’t even leave the breath of a sigh behind, not even a toenail. A clean exit, such as the Devil himself might make for reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on his hands. One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was left with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole day. Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling like the worm, one gathered rumors of her spectacular flight; she had been seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason no one knew, she had done a tail-spin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet, she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so forth. Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done apparently without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life, on the behavior of the antlike creature man, viewed from another dimension. Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the life of a full-blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed, because somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is something man made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr’acte in which every hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimeter of skin itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous, as though elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood rushing up to the brain and pounding at the eardrums like Himalayan devils with sledge-hammers; I hear her flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk, and I know she is pushing on and on, ever further away, ever further beyond reach. It is so quiet in the room and so frightfully empty that I shriek and howl just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to lift myself from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the shapeless feet of the rhinoceros. The heavier my body becomes the lighter the atmosphere of the room; I am going to spread and spread until I fill the room with one solid mass of stiff jelly. I shall fill up even the cracks in the wall; I shall grow through the wall like a parasitic plant, spreading and spreading until the whole house is an indescribable mass of flesh and hair and nails.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me, and alien and hostile. In retraversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not know, nor am I even sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me. The first glimpse, the first realization, of the bright new world came through my meeting Roy Hamilton. I was in my twenty-first year, probably the worst year of my whole life. I was in such a state of despair that I had decided to leave home. I thought and spoke only of California where I had planned to go to start a new life. So violently did I dream of this new promised land that later, when I had returned from California, I scarcely remembered the California I had seen but thought and spoke only of the California which I had known in my dreams. It was just prior to my leave-taking that I met Hamilton. He was a dubious half brother to my old friend MacGregor; they had only recently made each other’s acquaintance, as Roy, who had lived most of his life in California, had been under the impression all along that his real father was Mr. Hamilton and not Mr. MacGregor. As a matter of fact it was in order to disentangle the mystery surrounding his parentage that he had come East. Living with the MacGregors had apparently brought him no nearer to a solution of the mystery. Indeed he seemed to be more perplexed than ever after getting acquainted with the man who he had concluded must be his legitimate father. He was perplexed, as he later admitted to me, because in neither man could he find any resemblance to the man he considered himself to be. It was probably this harassing problem of deciding whom to take for a father which had stimulated the development of his own character. I say this, because immediately upon being introduced to him, I felt that I was in the presence of a being such as I had never known before.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The dance of the magneto world, the spark that unsparks, the soft purr of the perfect mechanism, the velocity race on a turntable, the dollar at par and the forests dead and mutilated. The Saturday night of the soul’s hollow dance, each jumping jigger a functional unit in the St. Vitus dance of the ringworm’s dream. Laura the nympho brandishing her cunt, her sweet rose-petal lips toothed with ballbearing clutches, her ass balled and socketed. Inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter they shove the copulating corpse around. And then crash! Like pulling a switch the music suddenly stops and with the stoppage the dancers come apart, arms and legs intact, like tea leaves dropping to the bottom of the cup. Now the air is blue with words, a slow sizzle as of fish on the griddle. The chaff of the empty soul rising like monkey chatter in the topmost branches of the trees. The air blue with words passing out through the ventilators, coming back again in sleep through corrugated funnels and smokestacks, winged like the antelope, striped like the zebra, now lying quiet as the mollusk, now spitting flame. Laura the nympho cold as a statue, her parts eaten away, her hair musically enraptured. On the brink of sleep Laura stands with muted lips, her words falling like pollen through a fog. The Laura of Petrarch seated in a taxi, each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then cauterized. Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a mouth full of gum. Hunkydory is the word on her lips. The heavy fluted lips of the sea shell, Laura’s lips, the lips of lost Uranian love. All floating shadowward through the slanting fog. Last murmuring dregs of shell-like lips slipping off the Labrador coast, oozing eastward with the mud tides, easing starward in the iodine drift. Lost Laura, last of the Petrarchs, slowly fading on the brink of sleep. Not gray the world, but lackluster, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed innocence. And this in the black frenzied nothingness of the hollow of absence leaves a gloomy feeling of saturated despondency not unlike the topmost tip of desperation which is only the gay juvenile maggot of death’s exquisite rupture with life. From this inverted cone of ecstasy life will rise again into prosaic skyscraper eminence, dragging me by the hair and teeth, lousy with howling empty joy, the animated fetus of the unborn death maggot lying in wait for rot and putrefaction. Sunday morning the telephone wakes me up. It’s my friend Maxie Schnadig announcing the death of our friend Luke Ralston. Maxie has assumed a truly sorrowful tone of voice which rubs me the wrong way. He says Luke was such a swell guy. That too sounds the wrong note for me because while Luke was all right, he was only so-so, not precisely what you might call a swell guy.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here today. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park. Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence’s work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence’s ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence’s words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past. My friend Kronski used to twit me about my “euphorias.” It was a sly way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolley car. Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in one of my states of “euphoria.” We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way about his wife’s ovaries. In the first place he didn’t know precisely what ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  A few days after David’s death, Gretchen’s parents called her from their home in Jamaica, because they had heard about the incident. Gretchen succeeded in convincing them that the young man was not actually dead. The leader had told her it would be a great miracle when he awakened, and nonbelievers would flock to the group. Two years after David’s death, Gretchen was kicked out of the group for her “spirit of rebellion.” She just couldn’t take anymore. She had given and given to the group, and it was never considered enough. “I guess you could say I was burned out,” she told former members of other groups during a meeting of an ex-cultist support group. “Something inside me just turned off. Even though I was still frightened of doing the wrong thing or being ‘out of the Spirit,’ I just couldn’t feel repentant any more for the ‘sins’ they had fabricated about me. I noticed that no one was happy and smiling anymore. Everyone was afraid to talk to one another because they might not be speaking ‘in the Spirit.’ Yet, even after I was thrown out, I still believed they were right and held the exclusive key to salvation. It wasn’t until my parents had me deprogrammed that I started to understand that I’d been struggling with the mind control abuses, not with my relationship with God.” A few months after Gretchen left, the group began to use physical beatings, especially on women and small children, to eradicate “satanic spirits.” “It has taken me years to fully understand how deeply they controlled my emotions and thought processes,” Gretchen said. “If I hadn’t received good counseling, I probably would have kept trying to return to the group.” Gary Porter and Soka Gakkai/ Nichiren Shoshu Gary met and fell in love with Ann, a woman involved with Soka Gakkai, formerly known as Nichiren Shoshu of America (NSA). The organization originated in Japan and claims Buddhist lineage, although members of some other Buddhist sects question its authenticity. Under both names, this cult has been active in the United States since the early 1970s. They own and operate Soka Univeristy in California. Members believe that if they chant the words nam myoho renge kyo repeatedly in front of a rice-paper scroll called a gohonzon, they will gain the power to get whatever they wish. Ann had been involved for over two years when she began to chant nam myoho renge kyo for hours a day, in order to meet and marry a doctor. “People would chant for parking spaces, a new job, good grades in school, whatever,” Gary told former members at a ex-member support group meeting.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  One purpose of the show is to recruit new followers. Alan got involved by listening one night, and sent in his money to order Masters’ audiotapes on “meditation.” I’ve listened to these tapes myself, and they are not about meditation. They are actually a powerful hypnotic induction to Masters’ voice, causing listeners to open up to Masters’ control. Later, as I studied Masters, I learned that he had moved into the “exorcism” business: discovering people in his audience who he claimed were possessed and then liberating them—for a fee. His place of work was normally a hotel ballroom packed with people.167 Unlike most of my clients, the Browns had serious psychological problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that until I came to Michigan for a rescue attempt with their son, shortly before he went away for a one-month residential course, at Masters’ ranch in Oregon. I knew something was seriously wrong when I walked in the door. The family dog was virtually uncontrollable: jumping, barking and running all over the furniture. The Browns apologized to me, but it was evident that they were at their wits’ end. They were constantly undermining each other’s authority with the dog: one would tell him to go lie down, and then the other would encourage the dog to sit on his lap. As a dog owner and lover, it was clear to me that they lacked basic awareness. They knew nothing about dogs, or how to train them. They did not understand how the dysfunction in their own lives had negative consequences on their dog and on their child. Later, when I met Alan, I observed an only child who was obviously spoiled and overprotected. He was also slowly being driven crazy because he was constantly receiving conflicting messages from his two parents—messages they were unaware they were sending. One minute his mother would praise him for mowing the lawn, and the next his father would criticize him for taking two weeks to actually do it. The father would tell Alan he should get a job; then his mother would tell him he should wait a few more weeks. It was obvious to me that Alan was desperately trying to get away from his parents’ influence. He wanted to be independent, but he didn’t know how to begin to do so. He wanted to prove to his parents that he was capable, but his self-esteem was so low that he seemed to be always on the verge of depression. I wasn’t surprised to learn Alan had difficulties socially and had no friends outside of the Masters group. In this case, the authentic Alan was not happy or successful. He was miserable. From a counseling point of view, there was little from the past that could be used for him to reconnect with his authentic self.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the parlor; certainly I didn’t need twelve empty chairs placed around it in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practicer of magic. Such a man is beyond religion—it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth, wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which you have made of him, he will stand forth as a man in his own right and all the powers of the world will be of no avail against him. Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There is no magic in this wave length any more than there is magic in the womb. Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too—after life . Only one like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death as a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown and shield, yes! But not death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them with a will which can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm, is Yes!

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard—and in order to forget . I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself. It was just about a week before Valeska committed suicide that I ran into Mara. The week or two preceding that event was a veritable nightmare. A series of sudden deaths and strange encounters with women. First of all there was Pauline Janowski, a little Jewess of sixteen or seventeen who was without a home and without friends or relatives. She came to the office looking for a job. It was toward closing time and I didn’t have the heart to turn her down cold. For some reason or other I took it into my head to bring her home for dinner and if possible try to persuade the wife to put her up for a while. What attracted me to her was her passion for Balzac. All the way home she was talking to me about Lost Illusions . The car was packed and we were jammed so tight together that it didn’t make any difference what we were talking about because we were both thinking of only one thing. My wife of course was stupefied to see me standing at the door with a beautiful young girl. She was polite and courteous in her frigid way but I could see immediately that it was no use asking her to put the girl up. It was about all she could do to sit through the dinner with us. As soon as we had finished she excused herself and went to the movies. The girl started to weep. We were still sitting at the table, the dishes piled up in front of us. I went over to her and I put my arms around her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Tropic of Capricorn HENRY MILLER Table of Contents Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Caramna Corporation 2018 Tropic of Capricorn Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face. What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything. From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Being pushed over the precipice, it is easy at the last moment to surrender all one’s possessions, to turn and extend a last embrace to all who are left behind. How are we to stop the blind rush? How are we to stop the automatic process, each one pushing the other over the precipice? As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading “Do not abandon all hope ye who enter here!”—as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, No, I realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was a puppet in whose hands society had placed a Gatling gun. If I performed a good deed it was no different, ultimately, than if I had performed a bad deed. I was like an equals sign through which the algebraic swarm of humanity was passing. I was a rather important, active equals sign, like a general in time of war, but no matter how competent I were to become I could never change into a plus or a minus sign. Nor could anyone else, as far as I could determine. Our whole life was built up on this principle of equation. The integers had become symbols which were shuffled about in the interests of death. Pity, despair, passion, hope, courage— these were the temporal refractions caused by looking at equations from varying angles. To stop the endless juggling by turning one’s back on it, or by facing it squarely and writing about it, would be no help either. In a hall of mirrors there is no way to turn your back on yourself. I will not do this. I will do some other thing! Very good. But can you do nothing at all? Can you stop thinking about not doing anything? Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know? That was the idea which lodged in the back of my head and which burned and burned, and perhaps when I was most expansive, most radiant with energy, most sympathetic, most willing, helpful, sincere, good, it was this fixed idea which was shining through, and automatically I was saying—“why, don’t mention it. . . . nothing at all, I assure you. . . . no, please don’t thank me, it’s nothing,” etc. etc. From firing the gun so many hundreds of times a day perhaps I didn’t even notice the detonations any more; perhaps I thought I was opening pigeon traps and filling the sky with milky white fowl. Did you ever see a synthetic monster on the screen, a Frankenstein realized in flesh and blood? Can you imagine how he might be trained to pull a trigger and see pigeons flying at the same time? Frankenstein is not a myth: Frankenstein is a very real creation born of the personal experience of a sensitive human being.