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 Wild (2012)

  3 HUNCHING IN A REMOTELY UPRIGHT POSITIONWhen I woke the next morning in my room at White’s Motel, I showered and stood naked in front of the mirror, watching myself solemnly brush my teeth. I tried to feel something like excitement but came up only with a morose unease. Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart. That was me. That was why I’d longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT. I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.O I went to the bed and looked at my hiking outfit. I’d laid it out carefully on the bed before I’d gotten into the shower, the way my mom had done for me when I was a child on the first day of school. When I put on my bra and T-shirt, the tiny scabs that still rimmed my new tattoo caught on the shirt’s sleeve and I delicately picked at them. It was my only tattoo—a blue horse on my left deltoid. Paul had one to match. We’d had them done together in honor of our divorce, which had become final only the month before. We weren’t married anymore, but the tattoos seemed proof to us of our everlasting bond. I wanted to call Paul even more desperately than I had the previous night, but I couldn’t let myself. He knew me too well. He’d hear the sorrow and hesitation in my voice and discern that it was not only that I felt anxious about beginning on the PCT. He’d sense that I had something to tell. I put my socks on and laced up my boots, went to the window, and pushed the curtain back. The sun was blinding against the white stones of the parking lot. There was a gas station across the way—a good place to hitch a ride to the PCT, I supposed. When I let go of the curtain, the room went dark again. I liked it that way, like a safe cocoon that I’d never have to leave, though I knew I was wrong. It was nine in the morning and already hot outside, the vented white box in the corner come alive with its breezy roar. In spite of everything that implied I was going nowhere, I had someplace to be: it was day 1 on the PCT.

• From Iraq's Secret Sex Trade

  (sad string music continues) Mona's in such an impossible situation, what she thought was her teenage love story has ended up ruining her entire future. And if it wasn't for the cleric convincing her that it's religiously OK, this would have never happened. (suspenseful music) In Iraq today, Conservative Shia clerics give more than just spiritual advice. After years of sectarian conflict, they've gained political leverage often with the backing of armed militias. Activists say they're pushing women's rights back decades. There were laws that protected women, some protection for us in our marriages. It seems that all the things that we gained in decades of hard work of the generation of our mothers were just lost. Once the Islamic clerics rule the first losers are the women. (tense music) Our findings show that Iraqi law is failing to protect women. To try to understand what's happening, I've come to the courthouse in Sadr City. (indistinct talking) Just outside, I see the clerics I'd met earlier. They're operating a parallel religious legal system, conducting Sharia marriages and divorces. Faris al-Musawi is doing a Sharia divorce. It only takes 5 minutes. Divorce under Sharia law is easier than under Iraqi civil law. And leaves women with fewer rights. Sharia also allows child marriage. What's the youngest age that you'll marry? Under Iraqi law a girl must be 15 to marry. But this doesn't seem to bother some clerics. Inside the court, they're dealing with the consequences. Iraqi law doesn't recognise Sharia marriages. So to be legal, couples must have their marriage signed off by a judge. The law on the minimum age for marriage should be enforced. But that's not happening. (talking) Haneen is getting her marriage registered. She's dressed like a grown woman, but actually she's only 13 years old. (sad music) A cleric married Haneen to her husband under Sharia law six months ago. Now she's pregnant. Because she got married underage, Haneen's father and groom could get two years in prison. Instead they've been fined $50. It's up to the judge. And these days, many are lenient. (indistinct talking) There's a queue of fathers waiting for their daughters to get married before the judge. Sami Okaybi is here with his 14-year-old daughter. He didn't want her face shown. Why are you marrying your daughter off so young? Is there anything you're going to miss from your previous life? (indistinct talking) The court's social worker is registering the teenage brides and their grooms. She's processed 126 underage marriages in the last six weeks. She predicts almost all these teenagers will end up divorcing. If you're a divorced woman you don't have a future. You're looked at as a tainted person. You become very vulnerable to that cleric who whispers in your ears that he has the solution. They call it temporary marriage, being thrown off from one man to the other to the third, to the fourth, until you find out that you're a prostitute, with a religious cover.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They reached the crowded park at the bottom of Fifth Avenue. Eric had not seen the park for many years and the melancholy and distaste which weighed him down increased as they began to walk through it. Lord, here were the trees and the benches and the people and the dark shapes on the grass; the children’s playground, deserted now, with the swings and the slides and the sandpile; and the darkness surrounding this place, in which the childless wretched gathered to act out their joyless rituals. His life, his entire life, rose to his throat like bile tonight. The sea of memory washed over him, again and again, and each time it receded another humiliated Eric was left writhing on the sands. How hard it was to be despised! how impossible not to despise oneself! Here were the peaceful men in the lamplight, playing chess. A sound of singing and guitar-playing came from the center of the park; idly, they walked toward it; they each seemed to be waiting and fearing the resolution of their evening. There was a great crowd gathered in the small fountain; this crowd broke down, upon examination, into several small crowds, each surrounding one, two, or three singers. The singers, male and female, wore blue jeans and long hair and had more zest than talent. Yet, there was something very winning, very moving, about their unscrubbed, unlined faces, and their blankly shining, infantile eyes, and their untried, unhypocritical voices. They sang as though, by singing, they could bring about the codification and the immortality of innocence. Their listeners were of another circle, aimless, empty, and corrupt, and stood packed together in the stone fountain merely in order to be comforted or inflamed by the touch and the odor of human flesh. And the policemen, in the lamplight, circled around them all. Ida and Vivaldo walked together, Eric and Ellis walked together: but all of them were far from one another. Eric felt, dimly, that he ought to make some attempt to talk to the man beside him, but he had no desire to talk to him; he wanted to leave, and he was afraid to leave. Ida and Vivaldo had also been silent. Now, as they walked from group to singing group, intermittently, through romanticized Western ballads and toothless Negro spirituals, he heard their voices. And he knew that Ellis was listening, too. This knowledge forced him, finally, to speak to Ellis. He heard Ida. “—–sweetie, don’t be like that.” “Will you stop calling me sweetie? That’s what you call every miserable cock sucker who comes sniffing around your ass.” “Must you talk that way?” “Look, don’t you pull any of that lady bullshit on me.” “—–you talk. I’ll never understand white people, never, never, never! How can you talk that way? How can you expect anyone else to respect you if you don’t respect yourselves?”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But now despairing to make proficiency in that false doctrine, even those things (with which if I should find no better, I had resolved to rest contented) I now held more laxly and carelessly. For there half arose a thought in me that those philosophers, whom they call Academics, were wiser than the rest, for that they held men ought to doubt everything, and laid down that no truth can be comprehended by man: for so, not then understanding even their meaning, I also was clearly convinced that they thought, as they are commonly reported. Yet did I freely and openly discourage that host of mine from that over-confidence which I perceived him to have in those fables, which the books of Manichaeus are full of. Yet I lived in more familiar friendship with them, than with others who were not of this heresy. Nor did I maintain it with my ancient eagerness; still my intimacy with that sect (Rome secretly harbouring many of them) made me slower to seek any other way: especially since I despaired of finding the truth, from which they had turned me aside, in Thy Church, O Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of all things visible and invisible: and it seemed to me very unseemly to believe Thee to have the shape of human flesh, and to be bounded by the bodily lineaments of our members. And because, when I wished to think on my God, I knew not what to think of, but a mass of bodies (for what was not such did not seem to me to be anything), this was the greatest, and almost only cause of my inevitable error.

• From Iraq's Secret Sex Trade

  The girl is looked at as a piece of merchandise, and using the merchandise in specific ways is allowed, but the virginity is kept for that big sale that they will do in the future. (traffic sound) The 'big sale' is marriage. Yanar told me that some families see girls as a financial burden, and want to marry them off. But parents can only find a husband if their daughter's virginity is guaranteed. Pretending he had a real girl in mind, our reporter asked Sayyid Raad what would happen if he did take the girl's virginity during a pleasure marriage. They are speaking of how a man can get away with the crime of raping a young girl. So 'just leave her and go', what does this mean for the girl involved? If the males of the family are aware of what happened to her, they will be killing her, and then the honour of the male patriarchs is preserved. It is always the girl and the women who pay the price. (tense music) I interviewed a girl who is at grave risk of violence from her relatives. She lost her virginity in a pleasure marriage. We'll call her Mona and for her safety, we filmed an actor telling her story, using Mona's exact words. A few weeks later, the man took Mona to a cleric in Kadhimiya. She was only 14. Her parents knew nothing about it. So the Sheikh knew you were a virgin? Did he ask for your parents consent? When she tried to stop seeing the man, he turned to blackmail. Mona had been groomed by a sexual predator, with the help of a cleric. We wanted to see how difficult it would be to get a cleric to do a pleasure marriage with a very young girl. It turned out to be easy. Sayyid Raad took our reporter to a waiting taxi. Our reporter had told him he wanted to do a pleasure marriage with a 13 year old virgin. He didn't ask to meet the girl in person, or talk to her family. He agreed to do the ceremony over the phone. Basically another colleague of mine, she was in the hotel and when he ring the phone my female colleague, she was on the other end of the phone and she was ready to answer. (phone ringing) I'm not thinking this marriage would be that simple. The only question he asks is, what is your name? And he began the ceremony without any questions. In just a few minutes, Sayyid Raad had made $200 for a pleasure marriage with a girl he believed to be only 13. For Mona, the consequences of her teenage pleasure marriage have been disastrous. (sullen string music) Her family are now pressuring her to get married. She told us something similar had happened to her cousin, with fatal results.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The decision of the blockade was communicated to the Forest Cantons, and vigorously executed, Zürich taking the lead. All supplies of provision from Zürich and Bern and even from the bailiwicks of St. Gall, Toggenburg, Sargans, and the Rheinthal were withheld. The previous year had been a year of famine and of a wasting epidemic (the sweating sickness). This year was to become one of actual starvation. Old men, innocent women and children were to suffer with the guilty. The cattle was deprived of salt. The Waldstätters were driven to desperation. Their own confederates refused them the daily bread, forgetful of the Christian precept, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good" (Rom. 12:20, 21). Zwingli spent the last months before his death in anxiety and fear. His counsel had been rejected, and yet he was blamed for all these troubles. He had not a few enemies in Zürich, who undermined his influence, and inclined more and more to the passive policy of Bern. Under these circumstances, he resolved to withdraw from the public service. On the 26th of July he appeared before the Great Council, and declared, "Eleven years have I preached to you the gospel, and faithfully warned you against the dangers which threaten the confederacy if the Five Cantons—that is, those who hate the gospel and live on foreign pensions—are allowed to gain the mastery. But you do not heed my voice, and continue to elect members who sympathize with the enemies of the gospel. And yet ye make me responsible for all this misfortune. Well, I herewith resign, and shall elsewhere seek my support." He left the hall with tears. His resignation was rejected and withdrawn. After three days he appeared again before the Great Council, and declared that in view of their promise of improvement he would stand by them till death, and do his best, with God’s help. He tried to persuade the Bernese delegates at a meeting in Bremgarten in the house of his friend, Henry Bullinger, to energetic action, but in vain. "May God protect you, dear Henry; remain faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ and his Church."

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  O Thou, my hope from my youth, where wert Thou to me, and whither wert Thou gone? Hadst not Thou created me, and separated me from the beasts of the field, and fowls of the air? Thou hadst made me wiser, yet did I walk in darkness, and in slippery places, and sought Thee abroad out of myself, and found not the God of my heart; and had come into the depths of the sea, and distrusted and despaired of ever finding truth. My mother had now come to me, resolute through piety, following me over sea and land, in all perils confiding in Thee. For in perils of the sea, she comforted the very mariners (by whom passengers unacquainted with the deep, use rather to be comforted when troubled), assuring them of a safe arrival, because Thou hadst by a vision assured her thereof. She found me in grievous peril, through despair of ever finding truth. But when I had discovered to her that I was now no longer a Manichee, though not yet a Catholic Christian, she was not overjoyed, as at something unexpected; although she was now assured concerning that part of my misery, for which she bewailed me as one dead, though to be reawakened by Thee, carrying me forth upon the bier of her thoughts, that Thou mightest say to the son of the widow, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise; and he should revive, and begin to speak, and Thou shouldest deliver him to his mother. Her heart then was shaken with no tumultuous exultation, when she heard that what she daily with tears desired of Thee was already in so great part realised; in that, though I had not yet attained the truth, I was rescued from falsehood; but, as being assured, that Thou, Who hadst promised the whole, wouldest one day give the rest, most calmly, and with a heart full of confidence, she replied to me, “She believed in Christ, that before she departed this life, she should see me a Catholic believer.” Thus much to me. But to Thee, Fountain of mercies, poured she forth more copious prayers and tears, that Thou wouldest hasten Thy help, and enlighten my darkness; and she hastened the more eagerly to the Church, and hung upon the lips of Ambrose, praying for the fountain of that water, which springeth up unto life everlasting. But that man she loved as an angel of God, because she knew that by him I had been brought for the present to that doubtful state of faith I now was in, through which she anticipated most confidently that I should pass from sickness unto health, after the access, as it were, of a sharper fit, which physicians call “the crisis.”

• From Iraq's Secret Sex Trade

  The girl is looked at as a piece of merchandise, and using the merchandise in specific ways is allowed, but the virginity is kept for that big sale that they will do in the future. (traffic sound) The 'big sale' is marriage. Yanar told me that some families see girls as a financial burden, and want to marry them off. But parents can only find a husband if their daughter's virginity is guaranteed. Pretending he had a real girl in mind, our reporter asked Sayyid Raad what would happen if he did take the girl's virginity during a pleasure marriage. They are speaking of how a man can get away with the crime of raping a young girl. So 'just leave her and go', what does this mean for the girl involved? If the males of the family are aware of what happened to her, they will be killing her, and then the honour of the male patriarchs is preserved. It is always the girl and the women who pay the price. (tense music) I interviewed a girl who is at grave risk of violence from her relatives. She lost her virginity in a pleasure marriage. We'll call her Mona and for her safety, we filmed an actor telling her story, using Mona's exact words. A few weeks later, the man took Mona to a cleric in Kadhimiya. She was only 14. Her parents knew nothing about it. So the Sheikh knew you were a virgin? Did he ask for your parents consent? When she tried to stop seeing the man, he turned to blackmail. Mona had been groomed by a sexual predator, with the help of a cleric. We wanted to see how difficult it would be to get a cleric to do a pleasure marriage with a very young girl. It turned out to be easy. Sayyid Raad took our reporter to a waiting taxi. Our reporter had told him he wanted to do a pleasure marriage with a 13 year old virgin. He didn't ask to meet the girl in person, or talk to her family. He agreed to do the ceremony over the phone. Basically another colleague of mine, she was in the hotel and when he ring the phone my female colleague, she was on the other end of the phone and she was ready to answer. (phone ringing) I'm not thinking this marriage would be that simple. The only question he asks is, what is your name? And he began the ceremony without any questions. In just a few minutes, Sayyid Raad had made $200 for a pleasure marriage with a girl he believed to be only 13. For Mona, the consequences of her teenage pleasure marriage have been disastrous. (sullen string music) Her family are now pressuring her to get married. She told us something similar had happened to her cousin, with fatal results.

• From Iraq's Secret Sex Trade

  (sad string music continues) Mona's in such an impossible situation, what she thought was her teenage love story has ended up ruining her entire future. And if it wasn't for the cleric convincing her that it's religiously OK, this would have never happened. (suspenseful music) In Iraq today, Conservative Shia clerics give more than just spiritual advice. After years of sectarian conflict, they've gained political leverage often with the backing of armed militias. Activists say they're pushing women's rights back decades. There were laws that protected women, some protection for us in our marriages. It seems that all the things that we gained in decades of hard work of the generation of our mothers were just lost. Once the Islamic clerics rule the first losers are the women. (tense music) Our findings show that Iraqi law is failing to protect women. To try to understand what's happening, I've come to the courthouse in Sadr City. (indistinct talking) Just outside, I see the clerics I'd met earlier. They're operating a parallel religious legal system, conducting Sharia marriages and divorces. Faris al-Musawi is doing a Sharia divorce. It only takes 5 minutes. Divorce under Sharia law is easier than under Iraqi civil law. And leaves women with fewer rights. Sharia also allows child marriage. What's the youngest age that you'll marry? Under Iraqi law a girl must be 15 to marry. But this doesn't seem to bother some clerics. Inside the court, they're dealing with the consequences. Iraqi law doesn't recognise Sharia marriages. So to be legal, couples must have their marriage signed off by a judge. The law on the minimum age for marriage should be enforced. But that's not happening. (talking) Haneen is getting her marriage registered. She's dressed like a grown woman, but actually she's only 13 years old. (sad music) A cleric married Haneen to her husband under Sharia law six months ago. Now she's pregnant. Because she got married underage, Haneen's father and groom could get two years in prison. Instead they've been fined $50. It's up to the judge. And these days, many are lenient. (indistinct talking) There's a queue of fathers waiting for their daughters to get married before the judge. Sami Okaybi is here with his 14-year-old daughter. He didn't want her face shown. Why are you marrying your daughter off so young? Is there anything you're going to miss from your previous life? (indistinct talking) The court's social worker is registering the teenage brides and their grooms. She's processed 126 underage marriages in the last six weeks. She predicts almost all these teenagers will end up divorcing. If you're a divorced woman you don't have a future. You're looked at as a tainted person. You become very vulnerable to that cleric who whispers in your ears that he has the solution. They call it temporary marriage, being thrown off from one man to the other to the third, to the fourth, until you find out that you're a prostitute, with a religious cover.

• From Another Country (1962)

  That fence is falling down, he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint, or The tree is dead. In an instant, gone in an instant—it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought. That’s Ruth. Or There’s old Lennie. Son of a bitch is stoned again. It was very silent. He passed Cornelia Street. Eric had once lived there. He saw again the apartment, the lamplight in the corners, Eric under the light, books falling over everything, and the bed unmade. Eric——and he was on Sixth Avenue, traffic lights and the lights of taxis blazing around him. Two girls and two boys, white, stood on the opposite corner, waiting for the lights to change. Half a dozen men, in a heavy gleaming car, rolled by and shouted at them. Then there was someone at his shoulder, a young white boy in a vaguely military cap and a black leather jacket. He looked at Rufus with the greatest hostility, then started slowly down the Avenue away from him, waving his rump like a flag. He looked back, stopped beneath the marquee of a movie theater. The lights changed. Rufus and the two couples started toward each other, came abreast in the middle of the avenue, passed—only, one of the girls looked at him with a kind of pitying wonder in her eyes. All right, bitch. He started toward Eighth Street, for no reason; he was simply putting off his subway ride. Then he stood at the subway steps, looking down. For a wonder, especially at this hour, there was no one on the steps, the steps were empty. He wondered if the man in the booth would change his five-dollar bill. He started down. Then, as the man gave him change and he moved toward the turnstile, other people came, rushing and loud, pushing past him as though they were swimmers and he nothing but an upright pole in the water. Then something began to awaken in him, something new; it increased his distance; it increased his pain. They were rushing—to the platform, to the tracks. Something he had not thought of for many years, something he had never ceased to think of, came back to him as he walked behind the crowd. The subway platform was a dangerous place—so he had always thought; it sloped downward toward the waiting tracks; and when he had been a little boy and stood on the platform beside his mother he had not dared let go her hand. He stood on the platform now, alone with all these people, who were each of them alone, and waited in acquired calmness, for the train. But suppose something, somewhere, failed, and the yellow lights went out and no one could see, any longer, the platform’s edge? Suppose these beams fell down?

• From Wild (2012)

  I sweated as I hiked, the whole backside of me wet where my pack covered my body, regardless of the temperature or what clothing I wore. When I stopped, I began shivering within minutes, my wet clothes suddenly icy cold. My muscles had at last begun to adjust to the demands of long-distance hiking, but now new demands were placed on them, and not only to brace myself in the constant effort to stay upright. If the ground upon which I was walking was on a slope, I had to chop out each step in order to get my footing, lest I slip down the mountain and crash into the rocks and bushes and trees below, or worse, go sailing over the edge. Methodically, I kicked into the snow’s icy crust, making footholds step by step. I remembered Greg teaching me how to do this very thing with my ice ax back in Kennedy Meadows. Now I wished for that ice ax with an almost pathological fervor, picturing it sitting uselessly in the PCT hiker free box in Sierra City. With all the kicking and bracing, my feet blistered in new places as well as in all the old places that had blistered back in my first days of hiking, the flesh on my hips and shoulders still rubbed raw by Monster’s straps.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off. My grant more than covered my needs and I also had five hundred pounds on deposit, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The order had given me a hundred pounds on my departure, my grandmother had left me a small legacy, and I had won an academic prize worth another hundred guineas. But saving and hoarding had become an obsession, so much so that when I came to buy my first apartment in 1976, I had squirreled away enough money to put down a deposit and furnish the entire flat. I can still see the astonishment on the face of the building society representative when I told him that I had saved this money from my student grant: he agreed to allow me a mortgage without further demur. Money is not a neutral factor, but is highly symbolic. I had convinced myself that I was not going to be able to earn my own living, and I simply could not make myself believe that this was a ridiculous assumption. What I was really saying was that I did not have a future. I was just not making it out here as a secular. I could not, as that perceptive Basque consultant had noted, attach myself to anything. How could I engage with life when my heart was dead? How could I become an academic when I was no longer able to respond spontaneously to literature? How could I function when I was increasingly subject to “weird seizures”? When I looked ahead, the only possible future I could see for myself was a locked ward or a padded cell. My years as a nun had somehow made me unfit for the world, had broken something within me, and now I seemed unable to put myself together again. And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken? And yet, in a way, I also felt that by starving myself I was reaching out to the world. I was asking for help. People kept telling me that I was fine and congratulating me on how well I was doing. But I was not fine and I wanted people to know this. As the pounds fell off, as people like Jenifer started to notice my growing emaciation, I felt a perverse gratification. Look, I was saying, this is what I really feel like. Please notice—and help me.

• From Another Country (1962)

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1993 Copyright © 1960, 1962 by James Baldwin Copyright renewed 1988, 1990 by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by The Dial Press, New York, in 1962. Lyrics from “Porgy and Bess” copyright © 1935 by Gershwin Publishing Corporation, New York, N.Y. Reprinted by permission of the Gershwin Publishing Corporation. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. for permission to reprint excerpts from the lyrics of two songs: “Since I Fell For You” by Buddy Johnson. © 1948 Warner Bros., Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission. “I Loves You Porgy” by Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and George Gershwin. © 1935 (renewed 1962) George Gershwin Music, Ira Gershwin Music, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baldwin, James, 1924— Another country / by James Baldwin. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-8041-4971-6 I. Title. PS3552.A45A84 1993 813′.54—dc20 92-50564 Design by Marc J. Cohen Cover photograph © 1965 by Charles Moore/Black Star rh_3.1_c0_r5 For Mary S. Painter Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Book One: Easy Rider Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Book Two: Any Day Now Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Book Three: Toward Bethlehem Chapter 1 Chapter 2 About the Author Other Books by This Author They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. HENRY JAMES Book One: EASY RIDER I told him, easy riders Got to stay away, So he had to vamp it, But the hike ain’t far. —W. C. HANDY 1 He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square. It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o’clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him anymore—you took the best, so why not take the rest?—but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the endless stairs into the street.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I was during that period without Fold-powers—I had not, as a matter of fact, been able to disrupt sidereal time at will for eight full months, a fairly long fallow period for me, and while at first I had as usual been relieved not to have the distracting option of stopping all the clocks whenever I wanted to think or spy or feel, I was now really quite desperate to get back some of the old magic. What if I never accomplished a successful Drop again? Horrible. I wanted immediate controlled nudity. The calendar, the year-at-a-glance wallet calendar I carry around with me, that marvelous invention in which twelve locomotive-shaped months in series pull the miscellaneous freight of a full year of days along, had become my enemy. What had I done with all that free time? What had I done with my life, my interlife? Often on my mind was the slogan devised by some self-helper about ten years ago—“Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” It is a good, exciting, up-rewing slogan. But it was beginning to occur to me to wonder what the person who thought it up had done with the rest of his life, following the momentous minute when he first conceived of it. Has he been himself helped by his own snappy bumper sticker? Has he done anything else of note aside from writing it? Is his mightiest accomplishment going to be merely the invention of a memorable formula that urges others to accomplish something? And was the world any better for his having written what he had written? The world has recognized its inspirational value and fully metabolized it; individual lives have perhaps been in some cases improved as a result of its existence—high school homework may have been done that wouldn’t have been done, new leaves may have been turned over, difficult phone calls may have been made—but now its own big moment of efficacy is finished, it can no longer surprise us into sudden effort, and yet the person who thought it up is almost certainly still with us, living out, not Day 1, but Day 1,234, or Day 3,677, of the sadly anticlimactic rest of his life—repeatedly experiencing, as we all do, those brief calendrical regrets when it is no longer the toddlingly innocent fifth or sixth of a given month but somewhere early in the teens, midway down, and then suddenly it’s the twenty-sixth and the month is going forever, the one and only October you will be given that year, and the false optimism of a new young month is about to begin, like a stock split that without changing any fundamentals makes the price per share look alluringly cheap all over again; and then the “3” of the new month’s date again slides into the “5,” and the “5” mutates into the “12,” each of the thirty or thirty-one successive numerical dates carrying with it, regardless of what actually happens on that day, a default mixture of emotions that results simply from its location on the scaffolding of the calendar—a specific ratio between the residual determination to get whatever difficult or distasteful things there are outstanding done in the days of the month that remain and the growing despair at the many difficult or distasteful things that simply cannot get done in the days that remain and must be carried forward to the next month. The calendar was my enemy because I had no control over it anymore, no option of postponement, no eject button, and I had not been in control of it for over eight months.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Some transsexuals themselves define a transsexual by the willingness to have the surgery: castration in exchange for a vagina and breasts, mastectomy and hysterectomy in exchange for a penis. Research shows that suicide rates among transsexuals, six times higher than the rest of the population to begin with, don’t significantly drop after surgery, that at least one-fourth of postsurgical TSs regret the operation. But hormones and living the role is not always enough. If you believe women are people who have vaginas, you have to have a vagina at the point at which you have socially and culturally become a woman. “Because we are men, not having a penis is very traumatic,” says an FTM transsexual, neatly transcribing the most acute and persistent penis envy in human nature. Once he has a penis of some kind, that envy merges into a lifelong fear of castration. Transsexuals willingly undergo the kind of mutilation rituals associated with great rites of passage in many cultures. Where in another culture a person may face circumcision, tattooing, piercing, and other rituals of endurance and pain, the transsexual has body-transforming hormones, castration, bilateral mastectomies or breast implants, voice lessons, rhinoplasty, jaw reductions. Most male-to-female transsexuals have their entire beards removed by electrolysis. Some have their trachea, or Adam’s apple, surgically shaved to a more feminine curve. And last is the reconstruction. How do you make a vagina? You can invert the penis, or use rectal tissue, which provides natural lubrication, or use an intestinal segment, each of these alternatives to be placed in a constructed abdominal cavity. Part of the scrotum becomes labia, complete with hair follicles, and a clitoral bud is taken from “sensitive” tissue. Postoperative care is extensive—the vagina must be stretched to keep it from closing, using a dilator for a period of weeks. Orgasm is common after surgery, and the surgery as a whole can be so good, it fools gynecologists. But not usually; there is often disappointment. On the other hand, only about one out of every ten FTMs go all the way through surgery, into the making of a penis. They often live in between, multihued, passing as men, but not men. Men have penises. To make a penis is much harder than making a vagina. One surgery simply releases the enlarged clitoris from its hood, removes the vagina, and constructs a scrotal sack out of the labia, adding implants for testicles. Others create new penises out of tissue from the abdomen. A partial change leads, sometimes, to partial acceptance; says one FTM of his mother’s reaction: “On Mother’s Day I get flowers, and on Father’s Day I get ties.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  That evening, Reverend Starbuck—who listed her denomination as “Metaphysical” on our forms—rush-delivered our paperwork, along with that of hundreds of others, to whatever authorities had been authorized to deem our speech act felicitous. By the end of the day, 52 percent of California voters had voted to pass Prop 8, thus halting “same-sex” marriages across the state, reversing the conditions of our felicity. The Hollywood Chapel disappeared as quickly as it had sprung up, waiting, perhaps, to emerge another day. One of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain “same-sex marriage” over and over again is that I don’t know many—if any—queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being “same-sex.” It’s true that a lot of lesbian sex writing from the ’70s was about being turned on, and even politically transformed, by an encounter with sameness. This encounter was, is, can be, important, as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled, with exchanging alienation or internalized revulsion for desire and care. To devote yourself to someone else’s pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy. My stepson is too old for Fallen Soldier or Bear Family now. As I write, he’s listening to Funky Cold Medina on his iPod—eyes closed, in his gigantic body, lying on the red couch. Nine years old. There’s something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions, and their frustration with the assimilationist, unthinkingly neoliberal bent of the mainstream GLBTQ+ movement, which has spent fine coin begging entrance into two historically repressive structures: marriage and the military. “I’m not the kind of faggot who wants to put a rainbow sticker on a machine gun,” declares poet CAConrad. If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority. This is not a devaluation of queerness. It is a reminder: if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us. At the 2012 Pride intervention in Oakland, some antiassimilationist activists unfurled a banner that read: CAPITALISM IS FUCKING THE QUEER OUT OF US. A distributed pamphlet read:

• From Another Country (1962)

  He saw the train in the tunnel, rushing under water, the motor-man gone mad, gone blind, unable to decipher the lights, and the tracks gleaming and snarling senselessly upward forever, the train never stopping and the people screaming at windows and doors and turning on each other with all the accumulated fury of their blasphemed lives, everything gone out of them but murder, breaking limb from limb and splashing in blood, with joy—for the first time, joy, joy, after such a long sentence in chains, leaping out to astound the world, to astound the world again. Or, the train in the tunnel, the water outside, the power failing, the walls coming in, and the water not rising like a flood but breaking like a wave over the heads of these people, filling their crying mouths, filling their eyes, their hair, tearing away their clothes and discovering the secrecy which only the water, by now, could use. It could happen. It could happen; and he would have loved to see it happen, even if he perished, too. The train came in, filling the great scar of the tracks. They all got on, sitting in the lighted car which was far from empty, which would be choked with people before they got very far uptown, and stood or sat in the isolation cell into which they transformed every inch of space they held. The train stopped at Fourteenth Street. He was sitting at the window and he watched a few people get on. There was a colored girl among them who looked a little like his sister, but she looked at him and looked away and sat down as far from him as she could. The train rolled on through the tunnel. The next stop was Thirty-fourth Street, his stop. People got on; he watched the stop roll by. Forty-second Street. This time a crowd got on, some of them carrying papers, and there were no seats left. A white man leaned on a strap near him. Rufus felt his gorge rise. At Fifty-ninth Street many came on board and many rushed across the platform to the waiting local. Many white people and many black people, chained together in time and in space, and by history, and all of them in a hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other, he thought, but we ain’t never going to make it. We been fucked for fair. Then the doors slammed, a loud sound, and it made him jump. The train, as though protesting its heavier burden, as though protesting the proximity of white buttock to black knee, groaned, lurched, the wheels seemed to scrape the track, making a tearing sound. Then it began to move uptown, where the masses would divide and the load become lighter. Lights flared and teetered by, they passed other platforms where people waited for other trains.

• From Wild (2012)

  “It’s socked in pretty much everywhere above here,” she replied. “All the thru-hikers have come down off the trail this year. They’re all walking along the Gold Lake Highway instead.” “The Gold Lake Highway?” I asked, bewildered. “Was there a man here in the past few days? His name is Greg. He’s fortyish? With brown hair and a beard.” She shook her head, but the waitress chimed that she’d talked to a PCT hiker who met that description, though she didn’t know his name. “You can take a seat, if you’d like to eat,” the woman said. A menu sat on the counter and I picked it up just to see. “Do you have anything that costs sixty cents or less?” I asked her in a jesting tone, so quiet my voice barely rose above the din. “Seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. Free refills,” she replied. “I’ve got lunch in my pack, actually,” I said, and walked toward the door, past pushed-aside plates that were piled with perfectly edible scraps of food that no one but me and the bears and raccoons would have been willing to eat. I continued out to the porch and sat beside Monster. I pulled my sixty cents from my pocket and stared at the silver coins in my palm as if they would multiply if I stared at them hard enough. I thought of the box waiting for me in Belden Town with the twenty-dollar bill inside. I was starving and it was true I had lunch in my pack, but I was too disheartened to eat it. I paged through my guidebook instead, trying yet again to hatch a new plan. “I overheard you inside talking about the Pacific Crest Trail,” a woman said. She was middle-aged and slim, her frosted blonde hair cut in a stylish bob. In each ear she wore a single diamond stud. “I’m hiking it for a few months,” I said. “I think that’s so neat.” She smiled. “I always wondered about the people who do that. I know the trail is up there,” she said, waving her hand westward, “but I’ve never been on it.” She came closer and for a moment I thought she’d try to give me a hug, but she only patted my arm. “You’re not alone, are you?” When I nodded, she laughed and put a hand to her chest. “And what on earth does your mother have to say about that?” “She’s dead,” I said, too discouraged and hungry to soften it with a note of apology, the way I usually did. “My goodness. That’s terrible.” Her sunglasses sat against her chest, dangling from a string of glittery pastel beads. She reached for them and put them on. Her name was Christine, she told me, and she and her husband and their two teenaged daughters were staying in a cabin nearby. “Would you like to come back there with me and take a shower?” she asked.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  My grant more than covered my needs and I also had five hundred pounds on deposit, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The order had given me a hundred pounds on my departure, my grandmother had left me a small legacy, and I had won an academic prize worth another hundred guineas. But saving and hoarding had become an obsession, so much so that when I came to buy my first apartment in 1976, I had squirreled away enough money to put down a deposit and furnish the entire flat. I can still see the astonishment on the face of the building society representative when I told him that I had saved this money from my student grant: he agreed to allow me a mortgage without further demur. Money is not a neutral factor, but is highly symbolic. I had convinced myself that I was not going to be able to earn my own living, and I simply could not make myself believe that this was a ridiculous assumption. What I was really saying was that I did not have a future. I was just not making it out here as a secular. I could not, as that perceptive Basque consultant had noted, attach myself to anything. How could I engage with life when my heart was dead? How could I become an academic when I was no longer able to respond spontaneously to literature? How could I function when I was increasingly subject to “weird seizures”? When I looked ahead, the only possible future I could see for myself was a locked ward or a padded cell. My years as a nun had somehow made me unfit for the world, had broken something within me, and now I seemed unable to put myself together again. And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken? And yet, in a way, I also felt that by starving myself I was reaching out to the world. I was asking for help. People kept telling me that I was fine and congratulating me on how well I was doing. But I was not fine and I wanted people to know this. As the pounds fell off, as people like Jenifer started to notice my growing emaciation, I felt a perverse gratification. Look, I was saying, this is what I really feel like. Please notice—and help me. “Well . . .” Jenifer trailed off. Her heart was just not in this at all. “Don’t let your egg get cold. By the way,” she added, as if in an afterthought, “I’ve been thinking that it might be nice if you could join us for Sunday lunch. It’s the only meal that we all eat together, and you are part of the household now. I really mean it,” she went on, less embarrassed now that she felt on firmer ground. “You’ve fitted in so well.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Fiction/Literature GOING TO MEET THE MAN “There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. Fiction/Literature IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions—affection, despair, and hope. Fiction/Literature NO NAME IN THE STREET A searing memoir and an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies, No Name in the Street is James Baldwin’s powerful commentary on the political and social agonies of America’s contemporary history. The prophecies of The Fire Next Time have been tragically realized—through assassinations, urban riots, and increased racial polarization—and the hope for justice seems more elusive than ever. Through it all, Baldwin’s uncompromising vision and his fierce disavowal of despair are ever present in this eloquent and personal testament to his times. Nonfiction NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME Nobody Knows My Name is a collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays on topics ranging from race relations in the United States—including a passionate attack on William Faulkner for his ambivalent views about the segregated South—to the role of the writer in society, with personal accounts of such writers as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer. Literature/African American Studies TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN’S BEEN GONE In this magnificently passionate, angry, and tender novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters, a man struggling to become himself even as he juggles multiple identities—as black man, bisexual, and artist–on the mercilessly floodlit stage of American public life. At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo’s childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage.