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 Bestiary (2020)

  You born with your legs tied together trussed like a pig in the tissue of me birds circled your cry your namelessness: there are certain gods nameless true I didn’t name you isn’t that a form of divinity? To be known to the world by body alone? Wake your father sleeping beside me you may think you’ll steal him someday but I let him be taken from his body I lent him this life & now he owes me a country where I’m alive today I wanted to sever his tongue skin it for the fish inside in this country you always spoke for me when the cashiers told me how much was owed you counted the money over I want to know how much you will forgive me for if I sewed his tongue to the back of his skull if I told you the truth about who fathered you when I say come take him I mean take me out of this sentence I’m running out of hands to hurt with words to make you return to me I mean I mean the river today on the Taiwanese radio channel reports of two murders in one day big news for a shit-small island one happened on the train older woman stabbing a stranger’s child no motive second about a mother sneaking onto the elevator of a hotel throwing her baby off the rooftop garden dozens of witnesses stuck evening traffic straddling electric scooters smoking out taxi windows that’s when they saw the falling thing a blue hospital blanket same sky shade some described it a stunned bird a baguette a piece of meteor a plastic bag even after the clean-up interviews arrest on-scene vigils candles no one would name what it was the hotel renamed itself & the mother later a prisoner in Taoyuan sentenced to labor in a candy factory photo in the papers wearing a striped uniform hairnet I turned off the broadcast before her live interview before she could say why she did it I have always known your favorite story: Hu Gu Po you drew stripes on your skin with ink you the tiger-woman never the child commissioned to kill it pouring oil into its mouth until boiled from the inside-out some of us born to play predator I know you sometimes move your sleeping daughter from her mattress to yours replacing your husband’s heat with hers you put her back before morning. You just like to hear her breathing at night a daughter is a source of light among others: fireflies you used to catch in your teeth bite open drink their assfuel beast undressed of its stripes the river licking its stones like teeth in my dreams my shits are soldiers I bury them in my yard my bed I mourn my bones that believe they’re home the moon a sound & your sisters the stripes I wear.

• From Cultish (2021)

  With no tangible organizational structure, no single leader, no cohesive doctrine, and no concrete exit costs, QAnon is not exactly in the same cultish category as, say, Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown. But a fully immersed QAnon follower couldn’t just go cold turkey. For those fully submerged in the world of “the awakening” and “the research,” climbing out of the rabbit hole could mean a profound psychological loss: a loss of “something to occupy one’s time, of feeling connected to something important, of finally feeling a sense of self-worth and control during uncertain times,” elucidates Pierre. Even if former believers come out to denounce QAnon, the existential consequences are enough to keep true die-hards under. Not everyone finds their way into a QAnon-level internet cult, but platforms from Facebook to Tumblr are what help life feel important and connected for so many of us. The way I see it, while celebrities and conspiritualists create their own cult followings online, the ultimate pseudo-church to which billions of us belong—even (and especially) figures like Dr. Joe Dispenza and Donald Trump—is social media itself. In a sense, we can’t even claim to be growing “less religious” when social media’s job is explicitly to generate ideological sects, to pack people’s feeds with suggested content that only exaggerates what they already believe. As each of us posts, curating our individual online identities, the apps capture those personas via metadata and reinforce them through irresistible targeted ads and custom feeds. No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it. The way we make choices—from our clothes all the way to our spiritual and political beliefs—is a direct consequence of these uncanny digital versions of ourselves. In her book Strange Rites , Tara Isabella Burton wrote, “America is not secular but simply spiritually self-focused.” In a social media–centered society, we’ve all been rendered at once cult leader and follower. iii.It would be easy enough for me to write off all these groups, from SoulCycle to Instagram, as cultish and thus evil. But in the end, I don’t think the world would benefit from us all refusing to believe or participate in things. Too much wariness spoils the most enchanting parts of being human. I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t let our guards down for a few moments to engage in a group chant or mantra. If everyone feared the alternative to the point that they never took even small leaps of faith for the sake of connection and meaning, how lonely would that be? Studies of famous scientists’ personalities and their receptivity to offbeat beliefs show that excessive cynicism actually stymies discovery.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  But at least I knew what was going on there.” “No, you didn’t.” Fiona wasn’t sure which fact Claire was refuting. Three adults and a child looked down at them from the porch of the big house, waiting. Fiona knew better than to force the issue, to elbow her way in the door. She said, “I’ll come back in the morning. I’ll bring doughnuts.” “Please don’t.” When Fiona returned the next day, a wooden barricade blocked the end of the long driveway. A man with a waist-length ponytail leaned against it, and as Fiona drove up, he made a “turn around” sign with one finger in the air. And she did, because Damian was already on a plane, and it was better to come back here with him, anyway. Over the next insomniac week, asking around Boulder and scouring the Internet, the two of them discovered the things Fiona was now telling Arnaud: The Hosanna Collective was the small and restrictive offshoot of an already restrictive parent cult from Denver. It was ostensibly Judeo-Christian, but also astrological, vegetarian, antitechnology, male-dominated. They believed that the church needed to return to a pure state described in certain chapters of the book of Acts, that everything since Paul had been corruption. They called Jesus “Yeshua” and celebrated no holidays but Easter. No money of their own, the communal life made possible by the near-constant labor of the women and children. The men sold honey and salad dressing at farmers’ markets, and did occasional construction work in town, contributing all their wages to the group. Fiona and Damian went to the police, but there was nothing illegal going on. Damian reminded her of what she already knew: The more they chased Claire, the more she would shut them out. They tried once more in person, this time approaching the compound in the squad car of a sympathetic police officer— Fiona was so sure that Damian, too, was remembering their desperate ride around Chicago nine years back that she didn’t need to mention it—but the same man who’d been at the barricade came out and unleashed an impressive string of legal language at the cop. And no, there was no warrant. Fiona and Damian sat at a bar in the Denver airport with bags under their eyes, both of them crying, then stopping, then crying. They must have looked, to other travelers, like lovers parting for the last time. He with a wedding ring, she without. Fiona said, “We should stay.” But there were more productive ways to spend their time and money. Damian would talk to lawyers. Fiona would contact Claire’s high school and college friends, even offer to fly them out. She’d track down Cecily Pearce and see if she might talk some sense into her son. Arnaud nodded along to all this but didn’t write it down.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The river steals the sky a color suggestive of birds where the river hinges like my elbow it floods when I say the snakes rise to the surface of the river like scars the snakes have always obeyed my veins the evening before you turned four the rain came red my tongue rumoring snake. I was nineteen five babies my breasts stones that skipped out of your mouth. You practiced latching on my finger firecrackering my husband the second one hard against me prick parting my ass I told myself be stone moan an animal awake somewhere is smoke I pour rainwater into rice for porridge four of your sisters strapped to me. Two across my chest, two on my back. I walk sandwiched by their hunger rain ranting down our street you asked to put on your boots new ones I cut from my own you said you’d never seen a puddle before a sea you could span with your mouth mirror the size of whatever I show it. Lake the width of your face you have mine nothing of your father don’t ask me why I hated you then your hair grown up black. You said you’d been watering it long you stood in the rain waited for your spine to sky. I held you by the hair stepped outside you dangling boneless from my hand my babies I wear asleep beaded to me. You kicking your feet as if dreaming this I walked to the nearest bridge eight houses away I counted in twos swinging you a sack of salt I threw you down my tongue in my mouth a salted slug dissolving your name the river outraged by last night’s rain ate you your white-bellied feet flippering so fluent on land wordless in water in in in in in river whipping itself this raw word I I threw the babies in too. What alive can tell me why. I & unstrapped the cloth all four of my babies spearing in after you I I I I even then they chose you over me water trotted over their backs . Snakes arriving to scalp you I watch you open your mouth in the water brief flower the snakes answering from inside you Years ago a storm chaperoned your birth the soil gave up its trees for adoption the snakes singing now rhyming that year & this morning my babies buoying river lifting like a tongue to lick my back turn me around I do I needle my body through the water stitch you this new ending I fish you out one by one last of all you my eldest I went in belting the river around my waist on land I lay you safe water flocking from your mouth the river revised you a new body ribs ridging into scales your skull a snakehead legs arrowed into a tail hands honed into fins

• From Bestiary (2020)

  GRANDMOTHERLetter V: In which I name you [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Dear final daughter, You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say all men are synonyms none the word you’re looking for when your husband went to the mainland you asked if you should have followed him I followed your father to this country & now I wear a diaper once I brought a piglet into my wedding bed tucked it between my legs & let your Ba fuck that instead I wanted to be the only one inside my body the piglet gave birth later to a litter of grenades each with a girl face I pulled their pins threw them into the river one by one rending the water into rain I see the zhongyi once a month & I pay him in memories my only currency once when you were little I said you could love your father or your mother but you had to pick one the one you love is your leash the other is a house you burn down you never told me what you chose but I know myself to fend off ash I tied the river in my hair like a ribbon I told you a lie there is no choice you have no father but me*1 the one you call Ba is not yours I conceived you with the river*2 I mothered & fathered you both the Ba you love better than me never sired you I milked you from the mountain Papakwaka I never named you answered to a whistle the same sound summoning dogs every neighborhood bitch born stray when you were born I was dry nursed you on a bitch’s teat you slept knotting your arms so tight they never learned how to be straight. I stood you against a wall for posture but you can’t train a spine to disobey itself I am sending all these letters separately but know I wrote this one first. To my last my not-son my knot daughter. You born with your legs tied together trussed like a pig in the tissue of me birds circled your cry your namelessness: there are certain gods nameless true I didn’t name you isn’t that a form of divinity? To be known to the world by body alone? Wake

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey. When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body. I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her. My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life? I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt. Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe. Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city. Let’s bring him home and you’ll be happy again. You’ll be a daughter again.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He laughs says the body is the motor in this situation says I am the driver in this situation I remember how you learned to drive from that ghostboy whose balls you licked you think I didn’t know heard you joking to your sister about planting his balls in the yard to grow us a son but could you find someone to teach me how to drive? I may shit the seat but I won’t hit anything living Remember the time you threw a knife to me no at me it perched on your sister let that be a lesson about intention. I eavesdropped on all your bones laboring to make blood your throat diameter of a fishbone nothing could fit down it I injected water into your belly needle stolen from the morphine-addicted widow the one whose doctor husband disappeared with the rest of the men when the rain was raided the police told her to listen to General [ ] [ ]-[ ] on the radio transcribing the night into names of the missing because they owned guns fists she didn’t tell them she was illiterate I transcribed General [ ] [ ]-[ ] ’s speeches for her when the soldiers came again they told her eat what you’ve written they said a woman is only loyal with a man’s words inside her I watched from the door you were strapped to me batting milk from my breasts the woman knelt in the road the roosters round her preening gungloss round her mouth O O O she swallowed each sheet of my handwriting I used to think the neighborwoman weak her needles sinning through skin now I pray to replace my blood something sweet & buzzed honey or bees my bones a hive of memory make me foamfooted porridge-headed as your father never thought I’d marry another soldier his sack of government rice pregnant with rats your father with his gold bars love for American rock I watched him hawk his Japanese watch sell his own shoes outside the bars in Taipei eavesdropping on jukeboxes he never knew the lyrics made them up in dialect the province he was born in north of a river cleaving mountains like an ass-cleft when he sang so off-pitch even birds offended shat all over his shoulders now his voice is a gnat I slap off my cheek you always thought I hated him saddling me with shit-stains the river I inherited like debt following me to bed bowl of water where I swim his dentures at night I wrap him in lamp-skin search for a bulb small enough to fit his mouth beneath his eyelids clots of flies I have always wanted to be that empty no need to be anything but living maybe god a hole we keep filling with our dead I envy the way he watches me TV the way he believes blinking his eyes changes the channel. Sometimes he thinks shutting off the TV means the weather is off the war has switched countries time to halve his skull into bowls pour out the oil of last week he thought the TV a window tried opening the country climb in this week gardening I dug a hole in the ground beneath my chili bush a rehearsal the hole sized for his skull my chili bush will keep the dogs away from his body I’ll home him better than any country the army claiming they’d pay him enough to keep hunger at home every hole is a crown the dead wear save me from what my hands plot * when I let them off the leash of my arms I mine for gods all of them hiding here I’ll dig him here he’ll share a grave with his gold They always say: cold feet in bed means a man will leave you I have had cold feet my whole life & still no luck _ My tail ticked side to side while I read the fourth letter, beating out of sync with each syllable.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Finally, he had to accept a small job with the Water Department. Even this was possible only because one of his friends pitied him. The job kept food on the table, but it was a big fall for him. The Old Man began to drink heavily, and many of the people he knew stopped coming to visit because now it was dangerous to be seen with him. They told him that maybe if he apologized, changed his attitude, he would be all right. But he refused and continued to say whatever was on his mind. “I understood most of this only when I was older. At the time, I just saw that life at home became very difficult. The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth, telling her to cook him food. Ruth became very bitter at how the Old Man had changed. Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, she would tell Roy and myself that our father was crazy and that she pitied us for having such a father. I didn’t blame her for this—I probably agreed. But I noticed that, even more than before, she treated us differently from her own two sons. She would say that we were not her children and there was only so much she could do to help us. Roy and I began to feel like we had no one. And when Ruth left the Old Man, that feeling was not so far from the truth. “She left when I was twelve or thirteen, after the Old Man had had a serious car accident. He had been drinking, I think, and the driver of the other car, a white farmer, was killed. For a long time the Old Man was in the hospital, almost a year, and Roy and I lived basically on our own. When the Old Man finally got out of the hospital, that’s when he went to visit you and your mum in Hawaii. He told us that the two of you would be coming back with him and that then we would have a proper family. But you weren’t with him when he returned, and Roy and I were left to deal with him by ourselves.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Prayer to Disappear a Tail: To Be Repeated Twice Nightly and Once in the Morning (Prior to Counting Every Toe in the Household)dear shangdi dear papakwaka please let my skin rescind all scars all tails let my teeth be benign as butterflies let my tail be a fuse if I light it the fire deletes me dear papakwaka if you are the mountain that mothered us all like my ama says please let me not become her hu gu po please let the world be extinct of children so I will have nothing to eat but myself dear papakwaka dear ancestors who took up spears toothpicked the dutch like fancy finger food who bombed back the qing dynasty with bags of farts who turned all japanese soldiers into beads with holes in their bellies please open my tail like an umbrella build me for protection not for prey keep buffering from girl from girl from girl from girl to please stop stalling if I have to transform let my new species be a window a bar of herbal soap my mother’s thumb in my ear dear papakwaka I know this story is outside your language but is hu gu po born one limb at a time or all at once which part of her am I already o papakwaka mountain teat mouth of us all please don’t strand my body outside its myth _ Before he left, we ate at the largest of Duck Uncle’s restaurants, an hour away in a mall that sold fake phones and sour plums. Duck Uncle told us the rules before we went in through the glazed double doors: No spitting anything out, even if you’re choking on it. No swallowing your noodles whole and then pulling them back out through your nose. No removing any item of your clothing at the table. No disturbances. The red carpet made my eyes runny and the plastic chandelier hung so low we ducked for it. Dozens of dim sum carts spun in a carousel around the room. My brother and I pointed at everything that swept by, the table so crowded we ate fast to keep it from collapsing. I filled my cheeks with boiled peanuts, then spat them at my brother’s head. You broke the rules, my mother said, while pinching my lips shut with her fingers. Duck Uncle said he’d feed us so well that we’d beg for bigger mouths. I tasted blood but didn’t know what dish it was coming from.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Her fields regrew as fingers and made a fist around the U.S. military base. The American soldiers taught her how to hunt communists, how to shoot a winter melon the size of a commie skull. The [ ], led by General [ ] [ ]-[ ], banned all languages but [ ]. This alphabet was banned too, meaning that this text does not exist in history. The soldiers broke glass bottles on the beach, cementing the shards along the shore to gouge the feet of invading commies. The radio said to prepare for an invasion at night, prepare for soldiers who come to eat your feet, and Ama said: What about the soldiers already here? What about the ones in my bed, the ones who fuck me into five daughters, the first one who sees only shadows, the second one I beat into bone, into something that floats? Myth: If you said anything about General [ ] [ ]-[ ], the river tattled on you. The river was made of ears and started a rumor of snakes. The snakes slithered into the bodies of dumped prisoners, feasting on the brains and swallowing their memories. Now the snakes are the only ones who tell stories. DAUGHTER Birdbirth When we arrived home, my mother unfolded Agong on the sofa while I visited my yard-holes and made sure Ama hadn’t emerged from one of them, hadn’t followed us back by swimming beneath the highway, bobbing her head out of the 口 to breathe. I walked through the yard, parting the darkness of the night like a pair of thighs. From the 口, something white poked out of the soil, bone-bright. When I plucked it out and held it up to the window, it was blank. It was the sheet of paper Ama had buried for me, saying I’d write back someday. I considered folding the sheet into a minnow and feeding it back to the 口, but instead I kept it, sliding it into my waistband. The paper molded to my belly, metal-hot. I had no words to write yet, but it didn’t feel right to bury something blank. Inside the house, my mother tucked Agong into our sofa, its cushions still smelling of Dayi’s sweat. She’d tried embroidering Bible verses onto them with silver thread but gave up halfway, each sentence left open like a body midsurgery. The word righteous was unraveling to its root. My mother and I kneeled together beside Agong, turning his head to the side and opening his mouth to irrigate his drool, redirecting it into an ashtray. I wanted to say I never meant to hurt him.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality—that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives—that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program. So long as nationalism remained a cathartic curse on the white race, it could win the applause of the jobless teenager listening on the radio or the businessman watching late-night TV. But the descent from such unifying fervor to the practical choices blacks confronted every day was steep. Compromises were everywhere. The black accountant asked: How am I going to open an account at the black-owned bank if it charges me extra for checking and won’t even give me a business loan because it says it can’t afford the risk? The black nurse said: White folks I work with ain’t so bad, and even if they were, I can’t be quitting my job—who’s gonna pay my rent tomorrow, or feed my children today? Rafiq had no ready answers to such questions; he was less interested in changing the rules of power than in the color of those who had it and who therefore enjoyed its spoils. There was never much room at the top of the pyramid, though; in a contest framed in such terms, the wait for black deliverance would be long indeed. During that wait, funny things happened. What in the hands of Malcolm had once seemed a call to arms, a declaration that we would no longer tolerate the intolerable, came to be the very thing Malcolm had sought to root out: one more feeder of fantasy, one more mask for hypocrisy, one more excuse for inaction. Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations. Younger leaders, eager to make a name for themselves, upped the ante, peddling conspiracy theories all over town—the Koreans were funding the Klan, Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a shortcut to fame, if not always fortune; like sex or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market. Nobody I spoke with in the neighborhood seemed to take such talk very seriously. As it was, many had already given up the hope that politics could actually improve their lives, much less make demands on them; to them, a ballot, if cast at all, was simply a ticket to a good show. Blacks had no real power to act on the occasional slips into anti-Semitism or Asian-bashing, people would tell me; and anyway, black folks needed a chance to let off a little steam every once in a while—man, what do you think those folks say about us behind our backs?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I sat on a bench, and smoked till my fingers scorched; and then I considered my plight.My situation, after all, was a ridiculously familiar one: I had been as cold and as ill and as wretched as this four years before, after my flight from Stamford Hill. Then, however, I had at least had money, and handsome clothes; I had had food, and cigarettes - had all I required to keep me, not happy, but certainly quick. Now, I had nothing. I was nauseous with hunger and with the after-effects of wine; and to get so much as a penny for a cone of eels, I should have to beg for it - or do what Zena recommended, and try my luck as a tart, up against some dripping wall. The idea of begging was hateful to me - I could not bear the thought of trying to extract pity and coins from the kind of gentlemen who, a fortnight before, had admired the cut of my suit or the flash of my cuff-links as I passed amongst them at Diana’s side. The thought of being fucked by one of them, as a girl, was even worse.I got up: it was too cold to sit upon the bench all day. I remembered what Zena had said the night before - that I must go to my folks, that my folks would take me. I had said that I had no one; but now I thought that there might, after all, be one place I could try. I did not think of my real family, in Whitstable: I had finished with them, it seemed to me then, for ever. I thought instead of a lady who had been like a mother to me, once; and of her daughter, who had been a kind of sister. I thought of Mrs Milne, and Gracie. I had had no contact with them in a year and a half. I had promised to visit them, but had never been at liberty to do so. I had promised to send them my address: I had never sent them so much as a note to say I missed them, or a card on Gracie’s birthday. The truth was that, after my first few, strange days at Felicity Place, I had not missed them at all. But now I remembered their kindness, and wanted to weep.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Religious mythology may have endorsed their structural and martial violence, but it also regularly called it into question. There was a strong vein of skepticism in Mesopotamian literature. One aristocrat complains that he has always been righteous, joyfully followed the gods’ processions, taught all the people on his estate to worship the Mother Goddess, and instructed his soldiers to revere the king as the gods’ representative. Yet he has been afflicted with disease, insomnia, and terror, and “no god came to my aid or grasped my hand.” 103 Gilgamesh too gets no help from the gods as he struggles to accept Enkidu’s death. When he meets Ishtar, the Mother Goddess, he denounces her savagely for her inability to protect men from the grim realities of life: she is like a water-skin that soaks its carrier, a shoe that pinches its wearer, and a door that fails to keep out the wind. In the end, as we have seen, Gilgamesh finds resignation, but the Epic as a whole suggests that mortals have no choice but to rely on themselves rather than the gods. Urban living was beginning to change the way people thought about the divine, but one of the most momentous religious developments of the period occurred at about the same time as Sin-leqi wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s life. It did not happen in a sophisticated city, however, but was a response to the escalation of violence in an Aryan pastoral community. Early one morning in about 1200 BCE, an Avestan-speaking priest in the Caucasian steppes went to the river to collect water for the morning sacrifice. There he had a vision of Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom,” one of the greatest gods in the Aryan pantheon. Zoroaster had been horrified by the cruelty of the Sanskrit-speaking cattle raiders, who had vandalized one Avestan community after another. As he meditated on this crisis, the logic of the perennial philosophy led him to conclude that these earthly battles must have a heavenly counterpart. The most important daevas—Varuna, Mithra, and Mazda, who had the honorary title ahura (“Lord”)—were guardians of cosmic order and stood for truth, justice, and respect for life and property. But the cattle raiders’ hero was the war-god Indra, a second-ranking daeva. Perhaps, Zoroaster reflected, the peace-loving ahuras were being attacked in the heavenly world by the wicked daevas.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The author of the Fourth Gospel, however, depicted Jesus as a cosmic being, God’s eternal “Word” (logos) who had existed with God before the beginning of time. 89 This high Christology seems to have separated this group from other Jewish-Christian communities. Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the kingdom. They too had an ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,” 90 condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.” 91 Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of Revelation, probably written while the Jews of Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire. 92 The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world. The Jewish revolt had broken out in Jerusalem in 66 after the Roman governor had commandeered money from the temple treasury. Not everybody supported it. The Pharisees in particular feared that it would make trouble for diaspora Jews, but the new party of Zealots (kanaim) thought that they had a good chance of success because the empire was currently split by internal dissension. They managed to drive out the Roman garrison and set up a provisional government, but the emperor Nero responded by dispatching a massive army to Judea led by Vespasian, his most gifted general. Hostilities were suspended during the disturbances that followed Nero’s death in 68, but after Vespasian became emperor, his son Titus took over the siege of Jerusalem, forced the Zealots to capitulate, and on August 28, 70, burned city and temple to the ground. In the Middle East, a temple carried such symbolic weight that an ethnic tradition could barely sustain its loss. 93 Judaism owed its survival to a group of scholars led by Yohanan ben Zakkai, leader of the Pharisees, who transformed a faith based on temple worship into a religion of the book.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  78 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.79 micha cárdenas, ed. Trans Desires/Affective Cyborgs (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), esp. “Trans Desire” and “Affective Cyborgs.”80 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1990), 192.81 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 28–29.Pleasure After Childhood Sexual AbuseAmita Swadhin Amita Swadhin is gentle and uncompromising. It's a rare combo. She puts her finger directly on a wound, but only to say—this is not right. This cannot continue. Her work with Mirror Memoirs to support healing from childhood sexual abuse is massive and deeply necessary. Here is part of her story. “Did you like it? Did it feel good?” My father’s words, directed at me. We were sitting on the floor in the bedroom I shared with my sister, fully clothed after he had raped me again. I don’t remember his face or the sound of his voice in that moment, but I remember his words. I remember the feel of the ugly dark brown slightly shaggy wall-to-wall carpet that he’d bought with his employee discount against my fingers as I ran my hands back and forth, back and forth. I remember staring at his face, trying to assess what he hoped—no, expected—to hear. I remember knowing the violent encounter would only be prolonged if I said the wrong answer. “Yes,” I said. “What did it feel like?” “Like … shooting over the moon and through the stars.” He smiled. My face remained blank, per usual, but my gaze was glued to his body, watching, waiting, eyes following his back as he walked out of the room. Something in me relaxed slightly: I had passed the test. The ordeal was over. For now. I was six years old. I already had a penchant for lying with panache. It was a survival skill. My father raped me at least once a week—and often more—for eight years of my childhood, beginning when I was four. Whenever my body would show my true feelings through tears, I got hit in the face until I stopped crying. And then the rape would continue. Whenever my body would show my true feelings through resistance, like hitting or kicking, I got pinned down and raped more violently. My father’s abuse including forcing me to watch porn with him regularly. Most of the scenes he forced me to watch were in the “incest porn” genre—VHS tapes depicting “daughters enjoying sex with their fathers.” I never knew whether the people in the videos were actors or whether they were actually fathers and daughters. I never knew where he acquired these tapes. But I knew with certainty: I hated those videos. And I hated my father.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It flew low, tailing light. It’s on fire, I said, and thought of Duck Uncle inside it. If we slit open the plane’s belly like a fish, he would spill out all shiny and scarfed in guts. I thought it was unfair that she was the only one being the bait, so I stuck my tongue out at the sky and wriggled it like a worm, luring all the lost. DAUGHTER Hu Gu Po (IV) The cost of being fatherless: Shut off notices from the water company (hang up, bathe with baking soda). Shut off notices from the electricity company (ignore: the house will starve itself dark). No exterminator (kill the ants with duct tape, termites with vinegar, rats with our hands). No calls from my father for two weeks, then months, then the trees started growing new beards. The fall my father stopped sending money or answering calls, my mother bought us plane tickets to the mainland, said she’d either bring him home or kill him there: She hadn’t decided which would punish him more. We got our passport photos taken in the living room of a Shanghainese man my father once bribed for a faster visa. The man told me to show my ears in the photo, tucking my hair back with one broad thumb. His hands were like my father’s: bruised nailbeds, knuckles loose as screws. I felt guilty for summoning my father through some other man’s body. We packed in the dark, my mother cursing my father’s cousins, their factory, my father, who must be dead, my father, who must have forgotten us, my father, who hadn’t called back, my father, who must have fished himself another family, another woman whose knees he prayed between. My brother begged her to turn on the lights, but she didn’t want us to see her face, its increasing resemblance to fear. I pretended we lived underground and had lightbulb-heads and were packing for our first trip to the surface. On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the window. Buildings toothpicked the sky. It was so humid I could gargle the air and spit it. In our hotel room, my brother and I slept on the floor, my mother on the skin-colored bed. The sheets were so thin they let light into our dreams. Our shadows sharked across the floor. The first night in Jiangsu, I dreamed my mother was kneeling over me, one of her hands balled inside my mouth and the other pressed over my nose, caging my breath in my chest. I woke believing that my tongue had dried into a cricket and leapt out of my mouth, and I crawled to every dust-clotted corner of the room searching for it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He ran for the door, through the hallway, then up the stairs to the roof. I’d later ask why he ran up instead of down, but he told me nothing. It was dark in the stairway, like turning the night back on, but we all followed after him. We scattered on the square rooftop, big as a parking lot, where wet lines of laundry hung heavy and dank as meat. Someone had burned something recently and the air was full of gossiping smoke. There was a chicken coop in the center of the roof, made of plywood and plastic wrap, and the two hens inside looked dead. My brother was standing at the edge, where the rooftop ended. Where the railing buckled its shadow around his waist. I was the one who got the closest. My thumb snagged the belt loop at the back of my brother’s jeans, but he had already climbed over the railing, the rust sloughing off on his hands. I came close enough to see that. He didn’t jump so much as sprint past the sky. He didn’t fall through the air so much as become it. Then my father was behind me, lifting me by my hair, saying Come back from there, come back. I didn’t know if he was talking to my brother or me. My mother had not moved since we got to the roof. She was a statue of salt, solidified by my eyes, but I saw she was speaking something, willing his wings. The building was at least a hundred stories, and when we first saw it from the window of the taxi, my brother said, It’s like a big boner. A big boner in the sky. I told him to shut up, it was not, it was beautiful, with rows and rows of windows opening like eyes. Wouldn’t you want to live somewhere like that, I asked him. The whole world in your window. My brother said, No, I’ll never live where he lives. Now the building was not tall enough. I needed it to never end, for the ground to be as far back as history. My mother, the one who watched, would tell the story better: She would say my father loved kites so much he became one, that my brother borrowed new bones. We both watched my father follow my brother as if tethered, yanked along, tied ankle-to-ankle by a kite-string. I grabbed at his ankle, but the weight of his want was too much for me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s mother was birthed from the belly of a crab. Her head rolled out in a helmet of orange shellac and her hands were toothed pinchers, capable of splitting rocks to sand. Her father—Old Guang the pirate—sucked her out of the crab’s disked stomach and spat her across the table, where she landed on clawed feet. Named Nawi, she walked sideways like a crab and ate shelled meat: beetles sucked clean, shrimp from the sea. When she turned fourteen, Nawi married a boy who had been born a beaver—he had four teeth like hinged doors—and bore thirteen children. The last one was born with a snake for a penis. Nawi stroked it, letting it learn the diameter of her wrist. Its voice filled her skull with its silk: I am your daughter and born to break you. I am your son and spine. Nawi believed the snake would eventually loosen like milk teeth or grow into another limb, vestigial and shriveled. The snake threaded its head into the baby’s diaper, forked tongue slurring the same song, like steam escaping, like a rock striking a river and then sinking. Whenever Nawi tried to nurse the baby, the snake nibbled her breasts and nipples, seeding her skin with poison. Her milk came out burnt and bitter silver. The snake stretched out, whipping the air with its tongue. Nawi decided to slaughter it. The snake was a bloodless white, rooted to the baby’s crotch like a radish. She brought the knife down and it cut as if through light. The snake never woke. In place of blood, smoke spiraled out of its body. It looked smaller not attached to anything, blue head tucked, tongue flickering, hungering. No scarring, no evidence of severance. The baby’s crotch was smooth as a tree stump. She tossed the snake’s body into the fire, slept with the milk-bulged baby in her arms. The next morning, the baby was awake and batting at Nawi’s braids, yanking her scalp awake. Where the stump had been, there was now a clutch of eggs, clinging clear as rain. She tried to dab them away. By evening, a dozen more were dewed to the baby’s crotch. Only three eggs bore snakes, braiding and unbraiding. They spoke at once, a knot of song, a tangle of telling. We are your daughters. We are your sons. Stroke us and we will save you. Feed us and we will not forget you. The snakes’ mouths outnumbered her own, so she obeyed them. She fed the snakes better than any of her children, even slaughtered the pigs and split the meat among the three heads, the hooves too. The snakes’ jaws opened wide as doorways. Hunger amplified them, sweeping up their songs like seeds, planting each note deep in her ears. She woke sobbing some nights, praying to be swallowed soon. The next month, the river receded like a hairline. At night the stars flaked off the sky as dandruff, salting the soil white.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  This light I lair. Now my holes are many . Gods blame me though memory. I taste torn , . brine I. I have many names hiring a home from water, . A history of the hole still family. Forgive me because & I watched you with my mouth. threw you I loved drown you to life. _ I read the last letter aloud in my yard. Ben sat in front of me with her legs forked open in the soil, her hand petting the 口. Reading aloud to the holes, I mispronounced all the silences, rewrote them with my own prayer. She’s getting ready to bury him, Ben said. She’s baiting us. My tail curled in on itself, fit in my hand like a stone. I wanted a window. I wanted to see something shatter because of me. I said I wasn’t going to let her bury anything. The bone in my tail was wincing down to a wick, preparing for me to light it. Its marrow was memory. When my mother came home from the foot spa that night, I said I was volunteering to be her weapon. She softened the knots of her hands in a bowl of hot water, said she was tired. But I said it anyway: Ama is going to hurt Agong. She turned away from the window, her face wiped of light. The sink behind her was full, the water silver with knives. You think I don’t know? she said, and I knew she was mocking me, her voice stretched out of shape over the words. Everything in my mouth sounded already wrong, gone sour. I looked down at the bruised tile floor, at her shadow grazing on mine, eating it whole. I know about the river, I said, looking up. I think it’s time to dam her. My mother’s knees must have come unscrewed: She knelt down, her back against the wall, her hands snagging in her hair when she tried to shift it out of her face. I moved forward through the dim of the kitchen, tugged down on her left ear like she always did for me when I was having a bad dream. When she jerked her head away from me, I told her she didn’t have to be afraid of Ama. While I untangled the hair from around her fingers, I imagined loosing my tail like an arrow, shortcutting it through Ama’s body, her ribs making a fist around her heart. Do you remember that story I told you? my mother said. I asked her which one, and she told me about the women who hanged themselves with their own hair when the mountains were mowed over. Once, we lived inside the ground. The sun swung like a bucket of our blood. When I asked her why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Alone on my mattress for the first time, I told the ceiling I’d leave Ma soon, find a man I can steer out of this city, a man who can snuff the sun out with his thumb. In the kitchen, I can hear Ma struggling to tug the thread of her breath up her throat. After breathing all the cleaning chemicals and the factory air, Ma’s lungs cringed to fists and beat at her ribs. When she needs someone to unsnag her breath, I fill a bowl with hot water and push her head an inch from the surface. The steam speaks for us. Her head bucks against my palm, but I press harder. Sometimes I want to sink her head into the water, remind her of the river, but I’m too afraid she’ll become a fish and wriggle out of my fingers. It’s more a punishment to keep her in this body, ache-lunged and coughing, skin worn thin as a lampshade. It’s not night yet, but Ma prefers the kitchen dark, says her eyes have never been native to light. When she wakes, her mouth opens before her eyes. She says, Jie, and I don’t correct her. She gets up from the stool and finishes the dishes. I do the drying. Ba’s not home yet, but he’s already on the bus, counting the stops with his shirt buttons. At every stop, he unbuttons one. When the shirt’s all the way open, the sweat of his chest beaconing through, he knows it’s time to get off. When Ma plunges her hand into the sink, groping for the bowl, she grabs the blade-end of a knife instead, releasing her blood into the water. Taking her hands out of the sink, I dry them on my shirt. I don’t know why I’m rescuing her hands from the water when they once tried to d____ me in the r___. In a year I’ll leave. I’ll marry your father, any man I can ride away from here. The irony: We’re the same as Ma. That’s what Ma did, marry out of her country, marry out of her body. _ You only know her as disappeared, but your fourth aunt was the first one to hold me when I was born: I practiced latching on her thumb, crying when I couldn’t suck anything out but blood. Her absence now is the size of the sky. The only thing that fills it is night. At night, I watch your yard-holes gaping for the moon to descend into their mouths like a nipple, fill them with milklight. Two nights after her wedding, she came back to pack the last of her things. Jie said they were driving to Reno for the honeymoon soon, and I told her not to gamble anything she wasn’t willing to lose.