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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I worked with an intensity and fury as if it was my last will and testament, and in many ways I felt it was. I continued to suffer from nightmares, constant anxiety attacks, severe heart palpitations, and a powerful, almost obsessive feeling that I would not live past my thirtieth birthday. I was living each day as if it were my last, as if everything had been compressed together by the war, and now every second counted. I wrote all night long, seven days a week, single space, no paragraphs, front and back of the pages, pounding the keys so hard the tips of my fingers would hurt. I couldn’t stop writing, and I remember feeling more alive than I had ever felt. Convinced that I was destined to die young, I struggled to leave something of meaning behind, to rise above the darkness and despair. I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war—to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward—not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence. I had been beaten by the police and arrested twelve times for protesting the war, and I had spent many nights in jail in my wheelchair. I had been called a Communist and a traitor, simply for trying to tell the truth about what had happened in that war, but I refused to be intimidated. I loved the night and I would write for hours as if no time had passed at all. I was exhausted and my back ached, but none of that seemed to matter. I felt wonderful inside, tired but completely consumed by my writing. I would drink a couple cups of coffee and then with a new surge of energy work for another hour or so as the bright lights of the morning began to fill the room. I’d neatly stack all the pages next to the typewriter after holding them proudly in my hands, then go to my bedroom and transfer out of my wheelchair onto a mattress on the floor. I remember thinking to myself one morning that if I died in my sleep, someone would come into the apartment and find those pages next to the typewriter and know that I was not a victim, but someone who had been trying to move beyond his terrible tragedy and the terrible injustice of that war.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The corpsman is reading a comicbook, still cursing at the baby. The baby is screaming and the Armed Forces radio is saying that troops will be home soon. The kid with the bloody stumps is getting a morphine shot. There is a general walking down the aisles now, going to each bed. He’s marching down the aisles, marching and facing each wounded man in his bed. A skinny private with a Polaroid camera follows directly behind him. The general is dressed in an immaculate uniform with shiny shoes. “Good afternoon, marine,” the general says. “In the name of the President of the United States and the United States Marine Corps, I am proud to present you with the Purple Heart, and a picture,” the general says. Just then the skinny man with the Polaroid camera jumps up, flashing a picture of the wounded man. “And a picture to send to your folks.” He comes up to my bed and says exactly the same thing he has said to all the rest. The skinny man jumps up, snapping a picture of the general handing the Purple Heart to me. “And here,” says the general, “here is a picture to send home to your folks.” The general makes a sharp left face. He is marching to the bed next to me where the nineteen-year-old kid is still pissing in his pants, babbling like a little baby. “In the name of the President of the United States,” the general says. The kid is screaming now almost tearing the bandages off his head, exposing the parts of his brain that are still left. “. . . I present you with the Purple Heart. And here,” the general says, handing the medal to the nineteen-year-old vegetable, the skinny guy jumping up and snapping a picture, “here is a picture. . . ,” the general says, looking at the picture the skinny guy has just pulled out of the camera. The kid is still pissing in his white sheets. “. . . And here is a picture to send home. . . .” The general does not finish what he is saying. He stares at the nineteen-year-old for what seems a long time. He hands the picture back to his photographer and as sharply as before marches to the next bed. “Good afternoon, marine,” he says. The kid is still pissing in his clean white sheets when the general walks out of the room. I am in this place for seven days and seven nights. I write notes on scraps of paper telling myself over and over that I will make it out of here, that I am going to live. I am squeezing rubber balls with my hands to try to get strong again. I write letters home to Mom and Dad. I dictate them to a woman named Lucy who is with the USO.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He’s asking me if I still have my Bible and he’s laughing real loud now, he’s laughing so loud the other men are telling him to shut up, to be quiet and let them go to sleep. It’s a madhouse, it’s a crazy house, it’s a wild zoo, and we’re the animals, we’re the animals all neatly tucked into these beds, waking up every morning puking at the green walls and smelling the urine on the floor. We’re hurting and we’re praying that we can get out of this place. Somebody, give us back our bodies! And each day I train in an exercise room that is very crowded with broken men, bodies being bent and twisted, put up on the parallel bars. Our therapists, Jimmy and Dick, train us hard. We put on braces and crawl on the floor. We’re pissing in our pants and crawling into the bathtub. We’re jumping up and down the curb, learning how to use our wheelchairs. There is a big wheel in the corner and they’re strapping a puny guy with glasses to it. I’m watching the clock and the kid is trying to spin the big wheel around. There are machines like the wheel all over the place, and there’s pain on all the faces. Some of us are trying to laugh, we’re talking about the beer that comes into the hospital in the brown paper bags. But you cannot mistake the pain. The kid with the long hair is in the hallway again, the kid who looks in and never does anything but look in. Now I’m grabbing the weights, twenty-five-pound weights, I’m grabbing them and lifting them up and down, up and down, until my shoulders ache, until I can’t lift anymore. I’m still lifting them even after that, I’m still lifting them and Jimmy is talking about his model airplanes and then he and Dick are lifting me up to the high bar. There are newly invented machines sold to the hospital by the government to make the men well, to take all the Willeys and the Garcias and make them well again, to fix these broken bodies. There are machines that make you stand again and machines that fix your hands again, but the only thing is that when it’s all over, when the guys are pulled down from the machines, unstrapped from them, it’s the same body, the same shattered broken man that went up on the rack moments before, and this is what we are all beginning to live with, this is what the kid standing in the hallway is saying with his eyes. It’s early in the afternoon. I’m standing on my braces, holding on to the parallel bars. My mother and little sister have just come through the doorway. It is the first chance for them to see me try to stand again.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  My mother is frightened, you can tell by the look on her face, and my sister is standing next to her trying to smile. They are holding each other’s hands. My legs are shaking in terrible spasms. They’re putting thick straps around my waist and around my legs and now my arms start to shake furiously. My mother and sister are still standing in the hallway. They haven’t decided to come into the room yet. Jimmy is strapping my arms along the pole and my big oversized blue hospital pants are falling down below my waist. My rear end is sticking out and Jimmy is smiling, looking over to my mother in the corner. “See,” says Jimmy, “he’s standing.” I start throwing up all over the place, all over the blue hospital shirt and onto the floor, just below the machine. Jimmy quickly undoes the straps and puts me back in the chair. My sister and my mother are clutching each other, holding real tight to each other’s hands. “It’s really a great machine,” Jimmy says. “We have a couple more coming in real soon.” I turn the chair toward the window and look out across the Harlem River to where the cars are going over the bridge like ants. 3 FOR ME it began in 1946 when I was born on the Fourth of July. The whole sky lit up in a tremendous fireworks display and my mother told me the doctor said I was a real firecracker. Every birthday after that was something the whole country celebrated. It was a proud day to be born on. I hit a home run my first time at bat in the Massapequa Little League, and I can still remember my Mom and Dad and all the rest of the kids going crazy as I rounded the bases on seven errors and slid into home a hero. We lost the game to the Midgets that night, 22 to 7, and I cried all the way home. It was a long time ago, but sometimes I can still hear them shouting out in front of Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue. There was Bobby Zimmer, the tall kid from down the street, Kenny and Pete, little Tommy Law, and my best friend Richie Castiglia, who lived across from us on Lee Place. Baseball was good to me and I played it all I could. I got this baseball mitt when I was seven. I had to save up my allowance for it and cash in some soda bottles. It was a cheap piece of shit, but it seemed pretty nice, I mean it seemed beautiful to me before Bobby and some of the other guys tore the hell out of it. I remember that I loved baseball more than anything else in the world and my favorite team was the New York Yankees.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I feel tubes going into my nose and hear the clanking, pumping sound of a machine. I still cannot feel any of my body but I know I am alive. I feel a terrible pain in my chest. My body is so cold. It has never been this weak. It feels so tired and out of touch, so lost and in pain. I can still barely breathe. I look around me, at people moving in shadows of numbness. There is the man who had been in the ambulance with me, screaming louder than ever, kicking his bloody stumps in the air, crying for his mother, crying for his morphine. Directly across from me there is a Korean who has not even been in the war at all. The nurse says he was going to buy a newspaper when he stepped on a booby trap and it blew off both his legs and his arm. And all that is left now is this slab of meat swinging one arm crazily in the air, moaning like an animal gasping for its last bit of life, knowing that death is rushing toward him. The Korean is screaming like a madman at the top of his lungs. I cannot wait for the shots of morphine. Oh, the morphine feels so good. It makes everything dark and quiet. I can rest. I can leave this madness. I can dream of my back yard once again. When I wake they are screaming still and the lights are on and the clock, the clock on the wall, I can hear it ticking to the sound of their screams. I can hear the dead being carted out and the new wounded being brought in to the beds all around me. I have to get out of this place. “Can I call you by your first name?” I say to the nurse. “No. My name is Lieutenant Wiecker.” “Please, can I . . .” “No,” she says. “It’s against regulations.” I’m sleeping now. The lights are flashing. The black pilot is next to me. He says nothing. He stares at the ceiling all day long. He does nothing but that. But something is happening now, something is going wrong over there. The nurse is shouting for the machine, and the corpsman is crawling on the black man’s chest, he has his knees on his chest and he’s pounding it with his fists again and again. “His heart has stopped!” screams the nurse. Pounding, pounding, he’s pounding his fist into his chest. “Get the machine!” screams the corpsman. The nurse is pulling the machine across the hangar floor as quickly as she can now. They are trying to put curtains around the whole thing, but the curtains keep slipping and falling down. Everyone, all the wounded who can still see and think, now watch what is happening to the pilot, and it is happening right next to me.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken; I have no such power. It is true, however, that during those nights of Bethar some disturbing phantoms passed before my eyes. The perspectives afforded the mind from the height of those barren hills were less majestic than these of the Janiculum, and less golden than those of Cape Sunion; they offered the reverse and the nadir. I admitted that it was indeed vain to hope for an eternity for Athens and for Rome which is accorded neither to objects nor men, and which the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilizations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended upon countless rare chances, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure. We should manage to destroy Simon; Arrian would be able to protect Armenia from Alani invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man's lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man. Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high: I fingered the stone of a ring on which on a day of bitter depression I had had those few sad words engraved.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It’s all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as was in it, because I woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I had walked in—without as much as a by-your-leave, sir! Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law—and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street toward dusk. I remember it because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, Manhattan. I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn’t quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time—this has no value, no value whatever. He didn’t say that, however, but just this over and over: “I’m sure you’d like it! I’m sure it’s just the place for you.” When he left me I was in a daze. I couldn’t get hold of him again quickly enough.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I know that this is death, but I am powerless to kill the knowledge of it, or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive, some speck of consciousness persists, and, as the inert carcass expands, this flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and gleams inside me like the cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so that I am like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some slender hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the surface of the deep, but it is so far away, the upper world, and the weight of the corpse so great that, even if it were possible, it would take years to reach the surface. I move around in my own dead body, exploring every nook and cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless exploration, for with the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and drifting like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra firma, never for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it is a growth without landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes with every least move or shudder. It is this interminable filling of space which kills all sense of space or time; the more the body expands the tinier becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is concentrated on the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous dead mass which I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out of which it grows, is no bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, in the very heart and gizzard of death, as it were, I sense the seed, the miraculous, infinitesimal lever which balances the world. I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass. When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I, the imperishable schizerino, a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death. Every day she thinks to find another means of sustenance, but there is no other, only this eternal seed of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. Fly, O devouring bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your nourishment glowing in the sickening emptiness you have created! You will come back to perish once more in the black hole; you will come back again and again, for you have not the wings to carry you out of the world. This is the only world you can inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness reigns.

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

  Hoyt lived with the group for 15 years, during which time he broke from his family. He didn’t see his parents for 12 years. After Von Mierers’ AIDS-related death in 1990, the group relocated to the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. This was one of Von Mierers’ designated “safe places.” Von Mierers had been the only person with supposed access to the space aliens, so the group became more survivalist in nature. They built a large compound outfitted with bunkers, and stockpiled weapons and a four-year supply of vacuum-packed food. Hoyt escaped the group in the summer of 1999. “I wish I could tell you I woke up one morning and had the realization, ‘Yikes! This is a dangerous cult and I need to get the hell out of here!’” he said. “Actually it took me three attempts to escape before I actually did. My self-esteem was so beaten down. I was constantly being told that I had let down the group and however hard I tried to improve, it was never enough. I had resigned myself to accepting the truth that I was a hopeless cause. I felt I was unfixable and unworthy.” Earlier that year, he had voiced doubts about Von Mierer’s apocalyptic prediction. At the time, he was traveling 300 days a year around the world modeling. “I guess you could say I still had one foot somewhat in reality. However, I paid heavily for expressing my doubts. Even though I was the group’s primary source of income and had given them many millions of dollars over the years, I was instructed to move to their North Carolina compound. I was told I couldn’t model anymore—they shaved my head weekly so I couldn’t work even if I wanted to. I was quarantined to the premises and given every type of slave labor they could think of ‘to teach me humility.’ I had to be the first one up and the last one to bed. I was forced to live in the garage with the dogs on a mat. I was literally and figuratively in the dog house,” he said. “Luckily, I can laugh about it now. But it was a horrible period in my life. I even contemplated suicide. But the crazy part was, as I much I hated being in that situation, I also felt like I deserved it. Even though leaving the group felt like such an act of cowardice, I felt like dead weight—that I was holding them back. I honestly felt that I was wasting their precious time and goodwill. My primary drive to leave the group was not because I thought they were bad or abusing me, but rather to relieve them of the burden of my uselessness.”

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

  Other people leave when they become victims of internal politics or personality conflicts. For example, many people get fed up and exit because they can’t relate to or readily follow their immediate superior. Long-term members often walk out when they feel that group policy is not being fairly and uniformly applied, or if there is a struggle for power. Over the years I have met a large number of people who have walked out of their group because they just couldn’t stand it anymore, yet they still believed in the leader. There are thousands of ex-Moonies who still believe that Moon is the Messiah, but just can’t tolerate the way the cult is run. In their minds they are waiting for the day that the group reforms its policies, so they can return. They do not understand that the group is structured and run the way it is because of Moon. The same pattern applies to ex-Scientologists who leave the group but who still think Ron Hubbard was a genius and that the “technology” works. These people call themselves “independents” or members of the “Free Zone.” If they still believe Hubbard was a great humanitarian and discovered how to be “free”, they are still suffering from undue influence. Over the decades, I’ve met thousands of people who were born into cults, but walked out. Even as children, some of them could never swallow the weird belief system, particularly if they went to public school and had positive relationships with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, coaches, and other caring people. Kick Outs I’ve encountered hundreds of people who were “kicked out” of their mind control groups because they bucked authority and asked too many questions. Others were abused to such an extent that they were damaged and no longer productive for the cult. Still others developed serious physical or psychological problems that cost too much money to be treated. They became a liability to their group. People who have been kicked out are almost always in worse shape than people who walk out or have been counseled out. They feel rejected by the group and its members. In the case of religious cults, they also feel rejected by God Himself. Many of them devoted their lives to their cults, turning over their money and property. They were told that the group was now their family, and believed that it would take care of them for the rest of their lives. Then, years later, they were told that they were not living up to the group’s standards and would have to leave. These people, phobic toward the outside world, felt cast into utter darkness. For many kick outs, suicide seems a realistic alternative to their suffering.180 No one knows how many people have committed suicide because of mind control. I personally knew of a number of people who killed themselves because of their cult involvement. Research should be done, as this is a major public health issue.

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

  By 1990, all members of MeK were intensely brainwashed, and forced to divorce their spouses and accept celibacy for the rest of their lives. A year later, in order to destroy any remaining family ties within the group, members were forced to surrender their children, who were adopted by other supporters in Europe and America. Masoud divorced the “love of his life” and was unable to see his children. Finally, in 1994 all members were forced to go through the final stage of Ideological Revolution called “self divorce”—total loss of their individuality and personality, and to act only through blind obedience of their cult identity to leadership. By 1996, after almost 20 years in MeK, Masoud began to wake up, as if from a very bad dream, and was able to find a way to get away. He experienced extreme, crippling back pain, which forced him to distance himself and receive care. There were other ex-members of the MeK and his family who still dearly loved and missed him. By then, almost all members of the group were living in camps in Iraq, isolated from the rest of the world, collaborating with the government of Saddam Hussein against their own country, Iran. In the largest of these, Camp Ashraf, cult leaders Masoud and Maryam Rajavi had created their own imitation Iran, complete with a pseudo-parliament and a replica of the Tehran bazaar. Their members, by now transformed into devoted, unquestioning slaves, helped the two leaders to live out their failed fantasy of being the only true leadership of Iran. In 2009, Camp Ashraf was seized by American forces, and MeK had to surrender all its arms and munitions. In August of 2014, I was invited by Richard E. Kelly of AAWA (Advocates for Awareness of Watchtower Abuses) to teach a workshop in London. I invited many of my friends and contacts to come attend. A press conference was also organized about terrorism as a mind control cult phenomenon and many important statements were given by colleagues. The videotape of the press conference can be found on my website.102 While in London, I was fortunate to be able to spend time with Masoud, even meet his ex-wife, who has remarried, and his wonderful daughter and son. It was a heartfelt experience being a part of a healing that continues to unfold. Masoud is dedicated to sharing his life experience to help prevent people being recruited into extremist cults and to develop programs to help those afflicted to exit and be rehabilitated. He is a respected and dear friend. His website is http://www.banisadr.info/ Josh Baran and Shasta Abbey, A Zen Buddhist Cult

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  getting real tired of the whole thing. It was all playing so fast and so hard. It all hurt too much. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. He wanted to forget it, but it wouldn’t stop. * * * He went back to the big sandbagged bunker to see the major. “That was a pretty rough night, sergeant,” the major said, looking up from the green plastic maps on his desk. “Yes sir,” he said. “It was pretty bad.” “Ran into a lot of them, didn’t you?” the major said, almost smiling. “Yes, we sure did. I mean they just sort of popped up on us and started firing.” The major looked down at the maps again and frowned slightly. “What happened?” he said. “What happened out there?” “Well, major, like I said, we were moving toward the village and we had just grabbed the woman.” “The woman?” the major said. “Yes, we had just grabbed the pregnant woman.” “She was pregnant?” “Well yes sir, but we didn’t find out until later. We didn’t even think she was a woman. She didn’t have any chest major, she was flat like a board and we tied her hands behind her back. And there was a boy with her, maybe her small son. We tied his hands too.” “And then?” said the major. “And then,” he said, “we took them up on top of a big sand dune that was a few hundred yards from the village.” “Didn’t anybody see you?” “Yeah,” he said. He could feel himself sort of relaxing now. “I think a couple of people in the village. They were going to get water or something. They saw us and one of them started running back to the village. The others just made believe they hadn’t seen us at all. I knew they had but they made believe and kept walking back to the village. We set up a perimeter on top of the hill. We set it up so we could watch all around us and see if anyone was coming out of the village after the woman.” “What time was this?” said the major. “Well—” he looked carefully at his watch. “I think it was about four. It was

• 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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  something snap. It sounds like the branch of a tree breaking off—and there is my right leg all twisted under me. I panic for the first few minutes, then call my father. He drives over right away and takes me to the hospital, the V.A. hospital in the Bronx. I spend the next six months there. * * * I am alone again. I have been lying in Room 17 for almost a month. I am isolated here because I am a troublemaker. I had a fight with the head nurse on the ward. I asked for a bath. I asked for the vomit to be wiped up from the floor. I asked to be treated like a human being. My leg has swollen to twice its original size. The thigh bone has been completely shattered in the break, leaving the bone sticking out just beneath the surface of my skin. It sticks out like a knife and every few minutes my leg jumps in violent spasms, the bone cutting and stabbing back and forth. The big clumsy cast I have been encased in isn’t doing any good. It is not going to heal. Again and again I wonder why it has happened, why I am back in the same place I fought so hard to leave before. The doctor never seems to be around. When he does show up it is only for a minute to see if I am still alive. He walks in and out, mumbles a few words. Once he calls me by the wrong name. It frightens me. It is like being in a prison. But it is not a prison, it is a hospital. The tall skinny man who brings my breakfast calls me Seventeen. “Seventeen!” he screams, waking me out of a doped sleep. “Seventeen! It’s time to eat.” Up and down the halls the nurses move like programmed robots, pushing their metal carts, giving shots, handing out medication. There is one nurse who always tells me I am crazy. She gives me extra doses of a drug to make me drowsy. It is so easy to lose it all here. The whole place functions so smoothly, but somewhere along the way I am losing, and all the rest of the people whom I can’t see in the rooms around me are losing too. Even if I make it out of this place, I think, even if I heal the leg, I will lose. No one ever leaves this place without losing something. Early one morning the doctor comes into my room and tells me he’s been thinking it might be a good idea to cut my leg off. He tells me that to cut the leg off would be a very simple thing. He makes it sound so easy, like there would be nothing to it. It’s they who are all crazy in here, I think. They are all moving so quickly, all of them in such a fantastic hurry. This place is more like a factory to

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  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 More about Hurricane Street ___________________ “The author of Born on the Fourth of July (1976) recounts the brief 1974 movement he initiated to change how Veterans Affairs hospitals cared for wounded soldiers . . . The great strength of this book is that the author never minces words. With devastating candor, he memorializes a short-lived but important movement and the men who made it happen. Sobering reflections on past treatment of America’s injured war veterans.” —Kirkus Reviews “[A] compelling snapshot of early 1980s activism. . . .

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e heroine, Anthia, is a superlative beauty who suff ers an utterly predictable sequence of threats to her chastity. “Oh dangerous charm, oh ill- starred beauty, why do you persecute me, why do you cause me such evil? Were the tombs and murders, the chains of slavery and the lawlessness of pi- rates not enough?” Having survived all this, the fi nal threat to Anthia’s corporal integrity was to be the most trying, as well as the most melodra- matic. “Now I will be placed in a house of ill- repute, and a pimp will compel me to lose the chastity which I have guarded up to now for Habro- comes.” When she learns that it is her lot to be sold into prostitution, she asks the slave who is the instrument of her fate to kill her. Anthia’s experi- ence of the brothel, and her eventual escape from it, is not only the cli- mactic episode of the Ephesian Tale. It is, in its utter conventionality, a ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  paradigm of the romance, of the genre’s most basic assumptions about the body and society.  Despite her pitiful death wish, Anthia ended up in the clutches of a brothel keeper in Tarentum, Italy. He compelled her to be placed in front of the brothel, and she lamented that she was compelled to play the harlot. But her despair quickly turned to resolve. “Why do I bewail my fate instead of fi nding some contrivance [mēchanē] by which I might preserve the chastity which I have safeguarded up to now?” As the crowd of lustful customers jostled to pay for her ser vices, Anthia, “without any recourse [amēchanē] from this evil, nevertheless found a device for her escape.” She threw herself to the ground and feigned the violent convulsions of an epileptic fi t. Th e dumb- struck crowd felt “pity and fear,” and their erotic aspirations were, temporar- ily, dampened. Th e pimp took her home to recover, and she wove an elabo- rate story to convince him that she was truly affl icted with the disease. Her feint succeeded in creating just enough delay to let the universe resolve itself happily. She remained inviolate, and when she eventually rejoined her hus- band, she could boast to him, “I remain pure for you, having contrived every device [mēchanē] for the preservation of chastity.” He, too, protested his unimpeachable fi delity, and they “easily persuaded each other, since that was what they wanted.”  Anthia’s escape from the brothel is a paradigm of the heroine’s chastity in the romance. Parallel endangerments from pimps and pirates, slave own- ers and other ruffi ans, recur throughout the entire genre.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You don’t know because you never stop to think. You’re letting people use you up. You’re a damned fool, an idiot. If I had a tenth of what you’ve got I could turn the world upside down. You think that’s crazy, eh? Well, listen to me . . . I was never more sane in my life. When I came to see you tonight I thought I was about ready to commit suicide. It doesn’t make much difference whether I do it or not. But anyway, I don’t see much point in doing it now. That won’t bring her back to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster. But I don’t want to kick off yet . . . I want to do some good in the world first. That may sound silly to you, but it’s true. I’d like to do something for others. . . .” He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile. It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to hope for, he was powerless to kill himself. That hopelessness was something quite alien to me. I thought to myself—if only we could change skins! Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more than anything was the thought that he wouldn’t even enjoy the funeral—his own wife’s funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes and some hearty belly laughs. Maybe I was too young to appreciate the sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and wept. But that never meant much to me because after the funeral, sitting in the beer garden next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer despite the black garments and the crepes and the wreaths. It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were really trying to establish some sort of communion with the dead person. Something almost Egyptian-like, when I think back on it. Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch of hypocrites. But they weren’t. They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for life. Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you went only by what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts. But they really didn’t grasp it at all—not the way the Jew does, for example. They talked about the life hereafter but they never really believed in it. And if any one were so bereaved as to pine away they looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane person. There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the impression they gave me.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  They believe that they are serving their fellowmen, and they are sincere in believing so, but they are heartless murderers and at moments, when they come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic, quixotic acts of goodness in order to expiate their guilt. The goodness of man stinks more than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, not an affirmation of the conscious self. 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.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you. In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying, as if by a great recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but men, the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image of the one and only one. If one isn’t crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens. It’s as though one had actually died and actually been resurrected again; one lives a supernormal life, like the Chinese. That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time. If your best friend dies you don’t even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a streetcar right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy—it is something monstrous and evil. You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything. At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This too is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep, waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth. This is the big issue, and this was always clear to me, even when I denied it. The dissatisfaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement. The more awake one becomes, as artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do anything. Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out of the trance. Action, as expressed in creating a work of art, is a concession to the automatic principle of death. Drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico I was able to partake of an active life which would permit the real self to hibernate until I was ripe to be born. I understood it perfectly, though I acted blindly and confusedly. I swam back into the stream of human activity until I got to the source of all action and there I muscled in, calling myself personnel director of a telegraph company, and allowed the tide of humanity to wash over me like great white-capped breakers. All this active life, preceding the final act of desperation, led me from doubt to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which, like a continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, had already sunk beneath the surface of the sea. The colossal ego was submerged, and what people observed moving frantically above the surface was the periscope of the soul searching for its target. Everything that came within range had to be destroyed, if I were ever to rise again and ride the waves. This monster which rose now and then to fix its target with deadly aim, which dove again and roved and plundered ceaslessly would, when the time came, rise for the last time to reveal itself as an ark, would gather unto itself a pair of each kind and at last, when the floods abated, would settle down on the summit of a lofty mountain peak thence to open wide its doors and return to the world what had been preserved from the catastrophe. If I shudder now and then, when I think of my active life, if I have nightmares, possibly it is because I think of all the men I robbed and murdered in my day sleep. I did everything which my nature bade me to do. Nature is eternally whispering in one’s ear—“if you would survive you must kill!” Being human, you kill not like the animal but automatically, and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are endless, so that you kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need. The men who are the most honored are the greatest killers.