Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  À La Recherché du Temps Perdu SOMETIMES I THINK THINGS OUT IN THE TIME IT TOOK me to win a race. 200-meter butterfly: 2:18.04. How long it takes to walk from my car to my office. 100-meter breastroke: 1:11.2. How long it takes to brush my teeth. It’s what swimmers do. It’s muscle memory. I remember things badly. When I look back, things are underwater, and when I pick them out and bring them to the surface they float around my idiotic attempts to drag them to land. I wonder what memory is, anyway. What writers are doing when they scratch at it. Usually I think of Proust, who tried to write a sentence about memory and ended up with seven volumes about nostalgia. In psychology, memory is an organism’s ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. It lives in the head, lights up with synaptic firings, and travels the waters of the nervous system. 400-meter individual medley: 4:55.1. How long to nuke a frozen Lean Cuisine. According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience. They found this truth in rats and lemurs. Little wires sprouting from their heads. However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever. When my father drowned in the ocean it took me the time of winning the 100-meter breast stroke. To reach his body. By the time I had dragged him to shore, I’d won the 200-meter butterfly. By the time an ambulance came, I’d won the 400-meter individual medley, the length of time it takes brain cells to begin dying. The length of time for his heart to fail. For memory to leave. Hypoxia. The rest of his life, of what he did to us, there was nothing left. Of who or what his daughter were or became, nothing. Of my mother, their courtship - he did have images. In a loop. Like film. Of his greatest architectural achievement, a shopping plaza in Trinidad, and the steel drum music and warm wet air and white sand and dark skinned women he’d found comforted his rage and disappointment, nothing. My father lost his memory in the arms of his daughter the swimmer.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  When my mother tried to kill herself for the first time I was 16. She went into the spare bedroom of our Florida home for a long time. I knocked on the door. She said, “Go away, Belle.” Later she came out and sat in the living room. I went into the spare bedroom and found a bottle of sleeping pills - most of which were gone. Alone in the house with her, I scooped up an armful of vodka bottles and pills and brought them to her in the living room, my eyes full of water and fear, my mind racing. She looked at me more sharply than I ever remembered, and more focused than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was weirdly stern and two octaves lower than the southern cheery slurry drawl I was used to. She said: “Stay away; this isn’t anything for you. I’m not talking about anything.” And she turned her gaze to the television. General Hospital was on. I went straight into the bathroom and sat on the toilet and ate a wad of toilet paper. My face felt hot enough to ignite. I cried hard. That hard kind of cry that brings guttural grunting rather than sobbing. I muscled up my bicep and I punched the wall of the bathroom. It left a small crack. My hand immediately ached. How I felt was alone. Like I didn’t have a mother. Or a father. At least not ones I wanted. When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her. It scared the crap out of me. I didn’t call my father. I didn’t call an ambulance. I called my sister, who lived in Boston, where she was busy getting a Ph.D., trying to erase her origins. My sister told me to call an ambulance and then to call our father. My mother in the living room watching soaps. I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all. My mother did not die. At least not that day. Eventually I did call an ambulance, and she went to the hospital, and they pumped her gut out. She was diagnosed with severe manic depression, and her doctor assigned talk therapy as part of her recovery. She saw a therapist five times. Then one day she came home and said, “I’m done.” But when she came home she was a dead woman masquerading as a live one. Drinking. Slowly. Surely. What she did next, well, sometimes it’s difficult to tell rage from love.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  the religious equivalent of a wholesome revolution in which the oppressing class is eliminated and the right- eous poor get relief. This central section of Christian eschatology was the product of the brave fight which Jehovah and his people made together for the ancestral freedom of the common people. The idea of a resur- rection of the dead did not come into eschatology through growing individualism, but out of the feeling that the righteous who had died before the inauguration of the new order were entitled to a share in the common hap- piness. Demonology and satanology, which pervaded Jewish eschatology after the exile, were, as we have pointed out, in part a religious expression of social and political hatred and despair. Those parts of eschatology which deal with the future of the individual were in the main derived from contem- porary Greek life. Greek religion was characterized by a profound desire for immortality and an equally deep sense of the sin and sadness of this earthly life. The mysteries ” ministered to this desire ; Christianity did it more effectively. In turn these religious desires brought out and strengthened those eschatological facts and ideas in Christianity which could serve them. Here we have one chief cause for the increasing other-world- liness of Christianity. Now, this attitude of weariness and resignation, which led to the immense popularity of ascetic ideals of life, was in part a product of the Roman Empire. It had clamped down its bureaucracy and its tax-gathering apparatus on all Mediterranean civiliza- tion ; the method was political subjugation ; the aim was economic exploitation. The self-government of the ESCHATOLOGY 213 Greek states by which the citizens might have been pro- tected, had been put under safe control. Revolt was useless. If we imagine a single empire today perma- nently holding the seas and continents in its grip, and enriching its aristocracy from the industry of others, with every way of escape barred, we shall understand the apathy of men under the Roman Empire. The escape into immortality was the only way to freedom left to all. This social condition left deep traces in Christian eschatology.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  By that time in my collegiate athletic career I could give a shit about good citizenship. When I competed, I didn’t even make the board. No one in the pool turned their head at the finish to see me. I was lucky I hadn’t drowned. I’d become the kind of woman whose mouth was stuck in a permanent “yes” shape. All I wanted was experience - especially if it would numb the fuck out of my brain. My I don’t know who the fuck I am-ism. My I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My couldn’t someone, please, anyone, love me? I would have put anything in my mouths. “ Well, this particular little beauty will sedate your ass and make you dreamy.” I opened my mouth and ate it instantly. [image file=image_rsrc268.jpg] He was right, I became sleepy, but not quite dreamy, so I asked for another. Two more women showed up. They didn’t look like swimmers. Too skinny. Long stringy hair. Glitter nail polish. They wore tube tops and Levis and flip-flops and giggled. They ate acid tabs and danced. Amy tried to get me to go back home that night but Monty talked me out of it. “I’ll walk her back, I’ll walk her,” He kept saying. The walk back was one of the funnier nights of my life. Oddly, I remember it. 3:00, maybe 4:00 a.m. Black night. Warm. We made a pit stop in the reflecting pool on campus where I laid down with all my clothes on, laughing, laughing. I said, “Look at me! I’m Ophelia!” Monty said, “Am I Hamlet?” “Fuck yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!” I screamed, and rolled around in 10-inch deep water illuminated by underwater lights. Campus police showed up and wrote things on small pieces of I’m not really a cop paper and handed them to us and told us to go home. After they left we ate them. Then we bumble fucked on the ground under a tree - my own pants were baffling me and I was too gone to really get it on but Monty didn’t seem to mind. Then we played a game where we would run as fast as we could and dive into shrubbery. The next day at swim practice I was covered in shrub scrapes and scratches and my head felt like cotton. Again. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to eat all the colors and see what I felt. No. I wanted to eat all the colors to get to the not feel. But even that was not enough for a burning girl. One night there were white lines on mirrors ready for me when I entered. “ Look,” I said laughing, “I’m Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz! Poppies!” Breathing in the white, breathing out comprehension and emotion.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  When the cop hand cuffed me and told me to sit in the back of his copmobile I was glad. Inside his car it was quiet. It smelled like air freshener and leather. I closed my eyes. Somewhere, very far away inside me, I felt a tiny pang of pain for the woman I’d hit and what was in her belly. But it was too much for me, so I opened my eyes and watched the cop write things down on a small clipboard instead. Briefly and without any drama I wished I was dead. But there were no other emotions or thoughts accompanying that. It just sat there like me in the back seat of a cop car, flat and plain and unevolved. Then he was driving me away from the scene to the station to be breathalyzed. In my head way back at the base of my skull near the top of my spinal cord I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t, did I? Mean to? The night stretched out long like it does when you fuck up. It’s like a night that lasts a year. Or like all the years of your life are suddenly in your lap, wailing like needy children. You can’t take care of all of them. You don’t even want to. You want to abandon each year child on the side of the road and bolt. I am not your mother. After the autopsy of my baby girl, a doctor told me in his office, “There is nothing conclusive to associate with her death. The cord was not around her neck, and there were no identifiable physical problems of any sort. Here is a copy of the autopsy report. I’m sorry. Sometimes this happens, and there is no explanation.” I stared at the white wall behind his head. He handed me a form that encouraged me to attend a special group therapy for parents whose babies died. When I left his office, I went into the clinic bathroom. I pulled my pants down and peed. I kept sitting there. Then I began to shred the white form he’d given to me into tiny pieces of paper, and I ate them, crying without a sound. The person I hit was a brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English. She sat on the dirty silver guardrail and cried. I watched her shoulders shake. She buried her face in her hands. She said words I didn’t know into her own palms. She held her belly and rocked and wept. When they took me away I was so relieved I almost thanked the cops-strange saviors. In my head I thought take me away from this woman. I can’t be near her. I can’t look at her. I can’t even accept that she exists. The image of a grieving mother is one that could kill me.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  In that long thick underwater I lived the life of a devalued woman. Not a wife. Not a mother. No one’s lover. No job or book gave me value to myself. I felt like a pointless woman sack. I lost pounds of flesh having no one to share a body with. My clothes began to hang off of my body as if I were someone else. Other women would compliment me on my supposed intentional feminine metamorphoses, and I’d smile, but I felt like an insect. In the morning I’d lose interest in washing my hair or brushing my teeth partway through, and find myself standing naked dripping in the bathroom staring at the floor or holding my toothbrush in the air, foam dripping from my mouth. When I wasn’t teaching or driving to and from teaching, I was at home. No, not home. An empty woman in a house. I’d sit in my living room alone grading student papers and stare out the large window onto the street. There were always more papers. I could picture a forever like this. Thoughtless and small and requiring me only to perform tasks with a pen. I’d drink only enough to not feel. Every day. About a bottle a day, roughly. Evenly. Sometimes wine, sometimes vodka. At night I’d watch T.V. until sleep saved me. Or didn’t. This is my life is what I felt. It is slow like still water. There is a dull hum in the ear and a softheadedness best used for napping or making coffee. There is a neighborhood and a house and a refrigerator. The comfort of appliances and going to the gas station. There is a car in which I ride to work and then come home. There is a linear and accessible story to follow. You don’t have to do anything. Or be. But then there was another woman on the other side of the glass. Staring numbly out the sanctity of the living room plate glass window one day I saw a woman with ashen skin and dirty blond hair walk by in denim cut-offs and a tube top and cowboy boots. Her arms looked like maps. The circles under her eyes weren’t shiners but could fool you. She had a jerk to her right shoulder every third step or so. Walking by woman. Then I saw an emaciated man in jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt walk after her. He hunched. He had darty eyes. He smoked. His hair hung down in a rat tail to the middle of his back. The thing is, I’d seen them before. Lots of times. For about two years. She was a hooker. He was her pimp. This was their beat. The alleyway behind my house. We’d been living this way - me on the inside with my ever safening bouge life. Them on the outside with some trace of my past in their skin and hair.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  If someone makes a revealing comment in passing, I can take time out to think about its hidden implications and check the expressions of others who have heard it, all while I’m right there and it is fresh in my mind. I also use the Fold when I’m called on to come up with something especially understanding or sympathetic in a conversation and I want to be sure that my tact is exactly on key—although there is a serious risk in mulling over your kindness for any longer than fifteen or twenty seconds, because as you weigh and polish your response you can quickly lose your working sense of the immediate emotional flux. I’ve nearly derailed one or two important heart-to-heart talks by pausing so long to hone my tone that when I was finally ready to re-enter time I knew that I was going to be brittle and foolish and insincere, exactly what I’d Dropped out to avoid, and I had a very hard time working myself back around to the mood that had made the conversation seem important enough for me to have wanted to interrupt it in the first place. Nonetheless, used sparingly, the Fold can really help with commiseration. It is an obvious escape, too—though here again, I have learned to use it sparingly. I was given a temp assignment at the alumni office of a graduate school, where I was asked to roll up posters and stuff them in mailing tubes. I did this for four straight days. I would not have minded if the posters had not been so ugly. On the second day, I found it difficult to entertain the notion of rolling up one more purple-and-black poster—the waste of glossy paper, of post office energy, of university money, seemed too awful—and so I hit the clutch and took two non-hours to read some of Diana Crane’s The Transformation of the Avant-Garde . In that case it helped a lot: the book was better, more licentiously toothsome, for being read en Folde . But there have been other times when, once I have lapsed into the timelessness of the arrested instant, the particular obligation or person from whom I have temporarily freed myself becomes more and more horrific, posed in its or his stalled imminence, and the idea that I will have to take up right where I have left off becomes unbearable, and I re-enter time’s cattle-drive with a sense of defeat and unhappiness more acute than any I felt before I had ducked, or copped, out. I think, too, that it is exceedingly dangerous to Drop when you are in any sort of depression about how bad the world is.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It had been only just midnight when I had staggered from the drawing-room still dressed as Antinous; I guessed it was about half-past now - a terrible time, because it meant we still had the longest, coldest hours to pass, before the dawn. I said, as humbly as I could, ‘What am I to do, Zena? What am I to do?’She looked over her shoulder at me. ‘I suppose, you shall have to go to your folks. You have folks, don’t you? You have some friends?’‘I have nobody, now ...’I put a hand to my face again; she turned, and began to chew on her lip. ‘If you really have no one,’ she said at last, ‘then we are both quite alike, for I have no one, neither: my family all threw me over, over the business with Agnes and the police.’ She gazed at my sailor’s bag, and nudged it with her boot. ‘Don’t you have a bit of cash about you anywhere? What’s in there?’‘All my clothes,’ I answered. ‘All the boy’s clothes I came to Diana’s with.’‘Are they good ones?’‘I used to think so.’ I raised my head. ‘Do you mean for us to put them on, and pass as gents ... ?’She had bent to the bag, and was squinting into it. ‘I mean for us to sell them.’‘Sell them?’ Sell my guardsman’s uniform, and my Oxford bags? ‘I don’t know ...’She raised her hands to her mouth, to blow upon her fingers. ‘You may sell ’em, miss; or you may walk down to the Edgware Road and stand at a lamp-post till a feller offers you a coin ...’ We sold them. We sold them to an old clothes seller who had a stall in a market off Kilburn Road. He was packing up his bags when Zena found him - the market had been trading till midnight or so, but when we reached it the barrows were mostly empty and the street was filled with litter, and they were shutting down the naphtha lamps and tipping the water from their buckets into the drains. The man saw us coming and said at once: ‘You’re too late, I ain’t selling.’ But when Zena opened the bag and pulled the suits from it, he tilted his head and gave a sniff. ‘The soldier’s duds is hardly worth my keeping on the stall,’ he said, spreading the jacket out across his arm; ‘but I will take it, for the sake of the serge, which might do for a fancy waistcoat. The coat and trousers is handsome enough, likewise the shoes. I shall take them from you, for a guinea.’‘A guinea!’

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  He explained that it was usually loss that caused the mother to die emotionally, and that the child then became invested for the rest of her life in trying to connect to the mother, in an attempt to revive and bring her back to life. Any child whose most devastating fear is abandonment will insist on connecting with their mother and do anything to feel close to her, including compromising parts of themselves. When they give up on bringing her back to life, they will try to restore the connection through the renunciation of their own aliveness. They will meet the mother in her deadness and thus will develop their own emotional deadness. The intergenerational aspect of deadness is everywhere in Eve’s psyche. She carries that emotional inheritance and identifies with her dead mother. Deep inside she, too, feels broken, deadened, ashamed. As a child, she tried to transform that feeling in the moments when she dreamed about creating life, about becoming a mother, having a hundred children. She calculated that if she gave birth ten times and each time she had ten babies, then a hundred kids could be a pretty realistic number of children. They would be like a family of puppies, snuggling together. She fantasized about a life filled with love, as she was struggling with layers of death. The wish for reparation colored Eve’s sexual desire. Sex served as a way to actively bring herself into the heart of her family trauma. Through the act of sex, we can touch the abyss, our sorrow, our desperation. “I need Josh to pin me down. And then I want him to touch me, gently, all over,” Eve tells me. “I want him to hold me as tight as he can, tie me to the bed so I can’t move, so he has all the power and I have no other choice but to trust him to treat my soul with care. I want him to make me feel better. ” Eve had sex with Josh, looked death in the eye, and fought it. She insisted that this time she would win, this time she would fix all the damage and the humiliation, she would revive and repair the deadness in herself, in her past, in her present, and certainly in her future. Her unconscious fantasy was that everything would be reparable and forgivable and she could end the cycle and stay fully alive as her daughter turned twelve. Reparation is an impulse of Eros, of life. It is the strongest element of creativity and is based on the wish to fix the damage and to heal the people we love.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We carry emotional material that belongs to our parents and grandparents, retaining losses of theirs that they never fully articulated. We feel these traumas even if we don’t consciously know them. Old family secrets live inside us. This section focuses primarily on the third generation of survivors. It turns a lens on the aftermath of the Holocaust, where repressed trauma often turns into nameless dread and untold stories are reenacted again and again. It explores the effects of early loss on the next generations, looks into the ways a grandparent’s sexual abuse might impact their grandchild’s life, and presents the secrets of a grandfather’s forbidden love as they appear in a grandson’s mind. When set against a backdrop of life and death, it is sometimes the erotic that offers a lifeline, a way into the land of the living. That which we don’t have permission to know haunts us and remains mystified, rendering us inconsolable. PART II OUR PARENTS The Secrets of Others T his section uncovers our parents’ secrets and hidden realities from the times before we were born and from our infancy. It explores known as well as unknown losses of siblings and the impact those have on the surviving children and on their offspring. It describes the enigmas of unwelcome babies—children of unwanted pregnancies and their constant struggle to stay alive. It looks into the eyes of fathers and fatherhood and further discusses the relationship between reparation and repetition: our wish to heal our parents’ trauma, to cure their wounded souls, which instead can lead us to reliving and repeating their painful histories . It is the ability to accept that which cannot be changed or fixed that allows us to start mourning. That permission to grieve for our losses and faults, as well as for our parents’, connects us with life and welcomes the birth of new possibilities. 5 WHEN SECRETS BECOME GHOSTS M y patient Noah has been preoccupied with death for as long as he can recall. When he was eight years old, he read the obituary section of the newspaper daily. “I wonder who this person was,” he would say, as he tried to share his interest with his mother. But she would shrug. “You can never really know.” Noah wanted to know; he needed to know. He was searching, investigating. Who had these dead people been? Whom had they left behind? How old were they when they died? Could Noah die? Could his parents?

• From Wild (2012)

  I rested in what shade I could find, fantasizing in intricate detail about cold water. The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center. Despite the things I’d endured so far on the trail, I’d never once considered quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted off. I staggered north toward Kennedy Meadows, furious with myself for having come up with this inane idea. Elsewhere, people were having barbecues and days of ease, lounging by lakes and taking naps. They had access to ice cubes and lemonade and rooms whose temperature was 70 degrees. I knew those people. I loved those people. I hated them too, for how far away they were from me, near death on a trail few had ever even heard of. I was going to quit. Quit, quit, quit, I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested (ten, five, ten, five). I was going to get to Kennedy Meadows, retrieve my resupply box, eat every candy bar I’d packed into it, and then hitch a ride to whatever town the driver who picked me up was going to. I would get myself to a bus station and from there go anywhere. Alaska, I decided instantly. Because in Alaska there was most definitely ice. As the notion of quitting settled in, I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea. I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering. Since I’d begun hiking, the struggles of my life had only fluttered occasionally through my mind. Why, oh why, had my good mother died and how is it I could live and flourish without her? How could my family, once so close and strong, have fallen apart so swiftly and soundly in the wake of her death? What had I done when I’d squandered my marriage with Paul—the solid, sweet husband who’d loved me so steadfastly? Why had I gotten myself in a sad tangle with heroin and Joe and sex with men I hardly knew?

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  When suddenly at darkest midnight heard, The invisible company passing, the clear voices, Ravishing music of invisible choirs — Your fortunes having failed you now, Hopes gone aground, a lifetime of desires Turned into smoke. Ah! do not agonize At what is past deceiving But like a man long since prepared With courage say your last good-byes To Alexandria as she is leaving. Do not be tricked and never say It was a dream or that your ears misled, Leave cowards their entreaties and complaints, Let all such useless hopes as these be shed, And like a man long since prepared, Deliberately, with pride, with resignation Befitting you and worthy of such a city Turn to the open window and look down To drink past all deceiving Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving. NOTES IN THE TEXT Page 18. ‘The Poet of the city.’ C. P. Cavafy.Page 18. ‘The old man.’ C. P. Cavafy.Page 39. Caballi. The astral bodies of men who died a premature death ‘They imagine to perform bodily actions while in fact they have no physical bodies but act in their thoughts.’ Paracelsus.Page 39. ‘Held the Gnostic doctrine that creation is a mistake.… He imagines a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sent out manifestations of himself in pairs of male and female. Each pair was inferior to its predecessor and Sophia (“wisdom”) the female of the thirtieth pair, least perfect of all. She showed her imperfection not, like Lucifer, by rebelling from God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him. She fell through love.’ E. M. Forster, Alexandria.Page 40. Quotation from Paracelsus.Page 51. Taphia, Egyptian ‘Red Biddy.’Page 53. Greek text. [image file=image_rsrc1AW.jpg] Page 77. Amr, Conqueror of Alexandria, was a poet and soldier. Of the Arab invasion E. M. Forster writes: ‘Though they had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch. She never functioned again properly for over 1,000 years.’Page 147. A translation of ‘The City’ is among the ‘Workpoints.’Page 195. See page ‘Workpoints.’Turn the page to continue reading from the Alexandria Quartet [image file=image_rsrc1AX.jpg] PART I I Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men … Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac. summer: buff sand, hot marble sky. autumn: swollen bruise-greys. winter: freezing snow, cool sand. clear sky panels, glittering with mica. washed delta greens. magnificent starscapes.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  These are stories of motherhood, of loyalties and lies, physical abuse, friendship and painful loss, demonstrating how often something is, in fact, known to us even as it is kept in a hidden place in our minds. The secrets we keep from ourselves are meant to protect us by distorting reality and to help us hold unpleasant information far from our consciousness. In order to do that, we use our defense mechanisms: we idealize those we don’t want to feel ambivalent about, identify with the parent who abused us, split the world into good and bad in order to organize the world as safe and predictable. We project into the other what we don’t want to feel or what makes us too anxious to know about ourselves. It is the emotional defense mechanism of repression that trivializes our memories and strips them of meaning. Repression protects us by splitting a memory from its emotional significance. In those cases, the trauma is held in the mind as an event that is “not a big deal,” “nothing important.” The disconnect between ideas and feelings allows us to protect ourselves from feeling something too devastating but also keeps the trauma isolated and unprocessed. Our defenses are important for our mental health. They manage our emotional pain and design our perception of ourselves and of the world around us. Their protective function, however, also limits our ability to examine our lives and live them to the fullest. Those experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation. It is those traumas that are unspeakable and too painful for the mind to digest that become our own inheritance and impact our offspring, and their offspring, in ways they cannot understand or control. Most of the personal stories that I tell here are accounts of buried traumas from the past that were held silently between people, life events that were not fully conveyed but still were known by others in cryptic ways. It is the stories that have never been told, the sounds that have often been muted, that leave us undone. I invite you to come with me to break the silence, to trace and discover the ghosts that limit our freedom, the emotional inheritance that prevents us from following our dreams, from creating, loving, and living to our full potential. PART I OUR GRANDPARENTS Inherited Trauma in Past Generations WE ALL HAVE our phantoms. But as the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham once wrote, “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” They were referring to intergenerational secrets and unprocessed experiences that very often don’t have a voice or an image associated with them but loom in our minds nonetheless. We carry emotional material that belongs to our parents and grandparents, retaining losses of theirs that they never fully articulated.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I feel that I destroyed everything that I created and that I won’t have a second chance. This time I won’t make it.” Eve doesn’t remember much from her childhood. She remembers being alone a lot, playing by herself under the desk in the bedroom she shared with her three younger brothers. She used to make little people out of paper and play family with them. They were the big family she hoped she would have one day, a family with many children who love and protect her and one another. The space under the desk was their home and she covered it with a blanket and hid there so she could play her imaginary games without interruptions. “There was one scene I used to play again and again,” she tells me. “It was the girl’s birthday and none of the family members would say ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. They ignored her, insulted and attacked her. It was the worst day of her life and she would sit in the corner of the house and cry silently. ” The scene always ended with a transformation: suddenly, in one minute, everything changed. The rejected girl discovered that it was all a mistake, a way for the family to hide a big surprise party that they had planned for her. “She realizes that it was just a trick,” Eve says in a childish tone, and I know she is telling me about how as a child she hoped it would all end up being a mistake, how she wished everything would change one day. The wish for transformation was an important part of her childhood fantasy. She dreamed of how she was going to transform her ugliness into beauty, her desperation into hope, her helplessness into power, hate into love, and everything that felt dead into life. And it happened. The little girl was transformed into a beautiful, powerful, and successful woman. She created the family she’d always wanted. But when her daughter was twelve years old, she suddenly felt empty, as if she were dying inside. “And then I met Josh,” she says. She is silent for a moment, turns, and gazes out the window. “He takes care of me as if I were a little girl,” she says quietly, as if talking to herself. “He takes care of me the way no one ever did, the way I imagine my mother took care of her mother.” I follow Eve’s associations and walk with her into her family history, into the bedroom where her sick grandmother lay, Eve’s mother, Sara, then twelve years old, lying next to her. I note that this is the exact age of Eve’s daughter when her affair with Josh began. Eve’s grandmother had been sick with liver cancer for two years.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  This kind of avoidance is not only stifling and isolating, but also can prevent former members from following up on job or housing leads. This faltering in their efforts to establish a productive life for themselves increases their sense of frustration and hopelessness. 3. Inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma. 4. Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities. Many former cult members lose interest in previously enjoyable or important activities. This apathy about life, even to the point of having suicidal thoughts, is a typical response to the loss of everything one once believed in, coupled with the trauma of cult life. 5. Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others. Former cult members often feel separate from others, or unrelated to them. They often don't know what to talk about or how to respond. They may be reluctant to socialize or go to parties, festivals, weddings, funerals, reunions, and so forth. This may be because they are unconsciously clinging to disdainful attitudes learned in the cult, or because they fear not knowing how to act in a social situation. In addition, ex-members may avoid spiritual, religious, or political events, depending on the type of group they were in. They may lose all faith and all connection to belief systems, and take no interest in exploring new ones. 6. Restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings). Former cult members may experience a reduced ability to feel emotions, particularly loving or joyful ones. Having been so betrayed, former cult members may feel safer keeping their distance and staying flat. Because their emotions were squelched, controlled, or manipulated in the cult, they may no longer be sure how to identify or express their feelings. Also, in many cults personal and/or intimate relationships, it is the leader or the ideology who determines celibacy, promiscuity, arranged marriages, forced breakups, and so forth. It is difficult afterward for former members even to sort how to approach relationships. Without help in this area, they may remain lonely and alone. 7. Sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span). Given that most former cult members are threatened with some form of extinction-real or figurative-if they leave the group, many ex-members carry a cloud of negativity about the future. They feel damned and doomed. Defectors are not expected to survive, much less thrive outside the context of the group, so many ex-members are unable to access any vision of the future; instead, they live with a sense of foreboding. If this is not dealt with, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than a true prophecy of the group. D. Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before the trauma), as indicated by two (or more) of the following: i. Difficulty falling or staying asleep. Much of this is due to anxiety, fear, ruminations, obsessive thinking, and so on.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  He sits at his desk in the Consulate-General covered by a perpetual confetti of pasteboard cards bearing the names of his colleagues. He is a pegamoid sloth of a man, a vast slow fellow given to prolonged afternoon siestas and Crebillon fils. His handkerchiefs smell wondrously of Eau de Portugal. His most favoured topic of conversation is women, and he must speak from experience for the succession of visitors to the little flat is endless, and rarely does one see the same face twice. ‘To a Frenchman the love here is interesting. They act before they reflect. When the time comes to doubt, to suffer remorse, it is too hot, nobody has the energy. It lacks finesse, this animalism, but it suits me. I’ve worn out my heart and head with love, and want to be left alone — above all, mon cher, from this Judeo-Coptic mania for dissection, for analysing the subject. I want to return to my farmhouse in Normandy heart-whole.’ For long periods of the winter he is away on leave and I have the little dank flat to myself and sit up late, correcting exercise books, with only the snoring Hamid for company. In this last year I have reached a dead-end in myself. I lack the will-power to do anything with my life, to better my position by hard work, to write: even to make love. I do not know what has come over me. This is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive. Occasionally I turn over a bundle of manuscript or an old proof-copy of a novel or book of poems with disgusted inattention; with sadness, like someone studying an old passport. From time to time one of Georges’ numerous girls strays into my net by calling at the flat when he is not there, and the incident serves for a while to sharpen my taedium vitae. Georges is thoughtful and generous in these matters for, before going away (knowing how poor I am) he often pays one of the Syrians from Golfo’s tavern in advance, and orders her to spend an occasional night in the flat en disponibilité, as he puts it. Her duty is to cheer me up, by no means an enviable task especially as on the surface there is nothing to indicate lack of cheerfulness on my part. Small talk has become a useful form of automatism which goes on long after one has lost the need to talk; if necessary I can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Kitty herself gave another little ‘Oh,’ and then a nervous smile. ‘It’s Flo,’ I said, ‘who’s the socialist, and who has got me into all this ...’ As I spoke, Florence took off her hat: immediately, Cyril began pulling at the pins that fixed her hair, and twisting the curls about his fingers. His tugs made her redden. I watched her for a little longer, then saw her look again at Kitty; and when I turned to Kitty herself I found that her eyes were upon me and her expression was rather strange.‘I cannot stop myself from gazing at you,’ she said, with an uncertain smile. ‘When you ran off, I was sure, at first, that you’d be back. Where did you go? What did you do? We tried so hard to find you. And then, when there was no word of you, I was sure that I would never see you again. I thought - oh Nan, I thought that you had harmed yourself.’I swallowed. ‘You harmed me, Kitty. It was you that harmed me.’‘I know it, now. Do you think I don’t know it? I feel ashamed to even talk to you. I am so sorry, for what happened.’‘You needn’t be sorry now,’ I said awkwardly. But she went on as if she had not heard me: that she was so very sorry; that what she had done had been so very wrong. That she was sorry, so sorry ...At last, I shook my head. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘What does all that matter now? It matters nothing!’‘Doesn’t it?’ she said. I felt my heart begin to hammer. When I did not answer, only continued to stare at her, she took a step towards me and began to talk, very fast and low. ‘Oh Nan, so many times I thought about finding you, and planned what I would say when I did. I cannot leave you now without saying it!’‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I said in sudden terror; I believe I even put my hands to my ears, to try to block out the sound of her murmurs. But she caught at my arm and talked on, into my face.‘You must hear it! You must know. You mustn’t think that I did what I did easily, or thoughtlessly. You mustn’t think it did not - break my heart.’‘Why did you do it, then?’‘Because I was a fool! Because I thought my life upon the stage was dearer to me than anything. Because I thought that I would be a star. Because, of course, I did not ever think that I would really, really lose you ...’ She hesitated.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then she closed the door, and turned the key in it; and the lights and the laughter of Felicity Place were lost to me, for ever. PART THREE Chapter 15 [image "021" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_021_r1.jpg] You might think that, having sunk so low already, I should not have scrupled to have banged upon the door that had been closed on me, or even tried to scale the gate, to plead with my old mistress from the top of it. Perhaps I considered such things, in the moments that I stood, stunned and snivelling, in that dark and lonely alley. But I had seen the look that Diana had turned on me - a look that was devoid of any fire, kind or lustful. Worse, I had seen the expressions upon the faces of her friends. How could I go to them, and ever hope to walk before them again, handsome and proud?The thought made me weep still harder; I might have sat and wept before that gate, perhaps, till dawn. But after a moment there came a movement at my side, and I looked up to see Zena standing there, with her hands across her breast, her face very pale. In all my agony, I had forgotten her. Now I said, ‘Oh, Zena! What an end to it all! What are we to do?’‘What are we to do?’ she answered: she sounded not at all like her old self. ‘What are we to do? I know what I should do. I should leave you here, and hope that woman comes back for you, and takes you in and treats you nasty. It’s all you deserve!’‘Oh, she won’t come back for me - will she?’‘No, of course she won’t; nor for me, either. See where all your soft talk has landed us! Out in the dark, on the coldest night in January, with not a hat nor even a pair of drawers; nor even a handkerchief! I wish I was in gaol. You have lost me my place, you have lost me my character. You have lost me my seven pounds’ wages, what I was keeping for the colonies - oh! What a fool I was, to let you kiss me! What a fool you was, to think the mistress wouldn’t - oh! I could hit you!’‘Hit me then!’ I cried, still snivelling. ‘Black my other eye for me, I deserve it!’ But she only tossed her head, and wrapped her arms still tighter about her, and turned away.I wiped my eyes upon my sleeve, then, and tried to grow a little calmer.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings — the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete egos modelling our own personal futures) — time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious. Too abstract for you? Then I have expressed the idea badly. I mean, in Justine’s case, having become cured of the mental aberrations brought about by her dreams, her fears, she has been deflated like a bag. For so long the fantasy occupied the foreground of her life that now she is dispossessed of her entire stock-in-trade. It is not only that the death of Capodistria has removed the chief actor in this shadow-play, her chief gaoler. The illness itself had kept her on the move, and when it died it left in its place total exhaustion. She has, so to speak, extinguished with her sexuality her very claims on life, almost her reason. People driven like this to the very boundaries of freewill are forced to turn somewhere for help, to make absolute decisions. If she had not been an Alexandrian (i.e. sceptic) this would have taken the form of religious conversion. How is one to say these things? It is not a question of growing to be happy or unhappy. A whole block of one’s life suddenly falls into the sea, as perhaps yours did with Melissa. But (this is how it works in life, the retributive law which brings good for evil and evil for good) her own release also released Nessim from the inhibitions governing his passional life. I think he always felt that so long as Justine lived he would never be able to endure the slightest human relationship with anyone else. Melissa proved him wrong, or at least so he thought; but with Justine’s departure the old heartsickness cropped up and he was filled with overwhelming disgust for what he had done to her — to Melissa. ‘Lovers are never equally matched — do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

• From Wild (2012)

  But paging through it for the first time while actually sitting on the trail was less reassuring than I’d hoped. There were things I’d overlooked, I saw now, such as a quote on page 6 by a fellow named Charles Long, with whom the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California heartily agreed, that said, “How can a book describe the psychological factors a person must prepare for … the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker’s volition, which are the real things that must be planned for? No words can transmit those factors …” I sat pie-eyed, with a lurching knowledge that indeed no words could transmit those factors. They didn’t have to. I now knew exactly what they were. I’d learned about them by having hiked a little more than three miles in the desert mountains beneath a pack that resembled a Volkswagen Beetle. I read on, noting intimations that it would be wise to improve one’s physical fitness before setting out, to train specifically for the hike, perhaps. And, of course, admonishments about backpack weight. Suggestions even to refrain from carrying the entire guidebook itself because it was too heavy to carry all at once and unnecessary anyway—one could photocopy or rip out needed sections and include the necessary bit in the next resupply box. I closed the book. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of ripping the guidebook into sections? Because I was a big fat idiot and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, that’s why. And I was alone in the wilderness with a beast of a load to carry while finding that out. I wrapped my arms around my legs and pressed my face into the tops of my bare knees and closed my eyes, huddled into the ball of myself, the wind whipping my shoulder-length hair in a frenzy. When I opened my eyes several minutes later, I saw that I was sitting next to a plant I recognized. This sage was less verdant than the sage my mother had grown in our yard for years, but its shape and scent were the same. I reached over and picked a handful of the leaves and rubbed them between my palms, then put my face in them and inhaled deeply, the way my mother had taught me to do. It gives you a burst of energy, she’d always declared, imploring my siblings and me to follow her lead on those long days when we’d been working to build our house and our bodies and spirits had flagged.