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 History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  THE 19TH CENTURY õ In the early 19th century, planters started changing their minds about those trouble-making missionaries. Now they began welcoming the evangelists to preach to their slaves with open arms. õ Missionaries and ministers became some of the most influential apologists for slavery. They actually built on Puritan covenant theology; they argued that slavery was a covenant between master and slave with mutual responsibilities. A master should be kind to their slave, but the slave must always obey their master. õ In 1857, the Presbyterian minister George Armstrong wrote that the church must work to make “good masters and good slaves,” and should have nothing to do “with the ultimate effect of this upon the civil and political condition of the slave.” In other words, emancipation might come one day if God willed it, but it was not the place of Christians to try to hurry it along. SLAVE RELIGION AND REBELLION õ During the early 19th century, many slaves in the Western hemisphere embraced the Bible. They developed a unique form of Christianity that focused on the message of Exodus, the story in the Hebrew Bible of the Israelites’ slavery and liberation. õ Sometimes prayer meetings provided cover for plotting rebellion. Take the revolt known as Gabriel’s Rebellion, which happened near Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. Gabriel’s brother Martin was a preacher, and he told their followers that their cause was just like the ancient Israelites’ pursuit of godly freedom. Lecture 19—Slave Religion in the Americas 185 õ Perhaps the most famous revolt was Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. Turner, a bit like Rebecca a century earlier, did an end-run around white church authority by claiming that he heard God’s voice and had miraculous visions. He led about 70 followers in an uprising that killed almost 60 white people. Roughly 200 black people were killed in the backlash that followed Turner’s capture. 186 The History of Christianity II

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  185Lecture 19—Slave Religion in the Americas THE 19TH CENTURY õ In the early 19 th century, planters started changing their minds about those trouble-making missionaries. Now they began welcoming the evangelists to preach to their slaves with open arms. õ Missionaries and ministers became some of the most influential apologists for slavery. They actually built on Puritan covenant theology; they argued that slavery was a covenant between master and slave with mutual responsibilities. A master should be kind to their slave, but the slave must always obey their master. õ In 1857, the Presbyterian minister George Armstrong wrote that the church must work to make “good masters and good slaves,” and should have nothing to do “with the ultimate effect of this upon the civil and political condition of the slave.” In other words, emancipation might come one day if God willed it, but it was not the place of Christians to try to hurry it along. SLAVE RELIGION AND REBELLION õ During the early 19 th century, many slaves in the Western hemisphere embraced the Bible. They developed a unique form of Christianity that focused on the message of Exodus, the story in the Hebrew Bible of the Israelites’ slavery and liberation. õ Sometimes prayer meetings provided cover for plotting rebellion. Take the revolt known as Gabriel’s Rebellion, which happened near Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. Gabriel’s brother Martin was a preacher, and he told their followers that their cause was just like the ancient Israelites’ pursuit of godly freedom. 186 The History of Christianity II õ Perhaps the most famous revolt was Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. Turner, a bit like Rebecca a century earlier, did an end-run around white church authority by claiming that he heard God’s voice and had miraculous visions. He led about 70 followers in an uprising that killed almost 60 white people. Roughly 200 black people were killed in the backlash that followed Turner’s capture.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ In the summer of 1535, two traitors let the bishop’s forces into the town, and they conquered quickly. They captured John and two of his lieutenants. Executioners bound each man to a pole with a spiked collar, heated iron pinchers until they were red-hot, and used these to rip their bodies apart for an hour. They used the tongs to pull out each man’s tongue, then finally—if they weren’t dead already—drove a burning-hot knife through his heart. The point of this sadism was to send a clear message about what would happen if anyone defied the bishop’s authority again. õ The bishop and Lutheran princes thought this social experiment in Münster was dangerous because it showed that radical new theology might lead to a radical challenge to existing political authority. THE ANABAPTISTS õ The radicals of Münster were Anabaptists. The word means “re- baptizer”; they believed that if you were baptized as an infant, it didn’t count, and you must be baptized again as an adult who makes the decision to join the true church. Their questioning of Catholic and Protestant views on community organization, political power, and ultimate salvation made them a protest movement that spread throughout Europe. õ The Münster radicals were not the first Anabaptists. They originally spawned from a dispute between the Swiss Protestant reformer Huldrych Zwingli and some of his followers about a decade earlier. One follower in particular, Conrad Grebel, thought Zwingli was way too patient and diplomatic with the Zurich city council. õ Particular points of contention were baptism and Zwingli’s decision to let the people of Zurich continue to celebrate Mass in the Catholic way until they were ready for reform. Grebel came to the conclusion that Zwingli obeyed man rather than God. 34 The History of Christianity II õ In the winter of 1524–1525, Grebel and some other Anabaptists challenged Zwingli to a debate. When the city council took Zwingli’s side and ordered the radicals to get in line, they met in secret and decided to form a new church that would follow the Bible and break away from the powers of the sinful world. õ In 1527, some Anabaptists got together to write a statement of faith called the Schleitheim Confession. Grebel wasn’t there—he died in 1526. He would have approved, though. The Schleitheim Confession insisted that Anabaptists would not serve in the military, swear any political oath, or even file a lawsuit in a secular court. They wanted complete “separation from Abomination,” as they put it. And they knew they would suffer for these decisions. To them, suffering was part of following Christ’s example. Lecture 4—The Anabaptist Radicals 35

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I reach back, clutching two of your fingers, and press my face into the dark slot under the bed. On the far end, near the wall, too far for anyone to reach, beside an empty water bottle, a single sock crumpled and filmed with dust. Hello. Dear Ma— Let me begin again. I am writing because it’s late. Because it’s 9:52 p.m. on a Tuesday and you must be walking home after the closing shift. I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain. For the first time in a long time, I’m trying to believe in heaven, in a place we can be together after all this blows over up. They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned. I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed. — You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes. Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore. Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss—the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them—never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven-hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard-issue apron. Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen. OxyContin, first mass-produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is an opioid, essentially making it heroin in pill form. I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work. Take it or leave it. The body, I mean. Take a left on Harris St., where all that’s left of the house that burned down that summer during a thunderstorm is a chain-linked dirt lot. The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language. After a month on the Oxy, Trevor’s ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict. —

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  I’m sitting in the shadows with Black George, wearing a coat I lifted from the clothing room, a bottle between us. The coat won’t last me through the night, I’ll pass it on to someone who needs it more. How’s it going? Chris asks, confused. I’ve been with Emily for nine years, working at Pine Street the last four. Halloween I spend the night with a friend in the East Village, a woman I’ve been seeing off and on for years. Emily finds out, confronts me, and I see that I really don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m adrift, as the Buddhists say, on a river of forgetfulness. A hungry ghost. Emily tells me I have to either get into therapy or we’re done. I call Lou, a therapist who comes recommended by another friend. An appointment is set for the next week, coincidentally on the anniversary of my mother’s death, six years before. That weekend a friend takes me to a party in the South End, to the loft of the brother of one of the Beastie Boys, or so she claims. Wearing a sweater pulled from Pine Street’s clothing room, I feel shabby beside the beautiful people. After an uncomfortable hour I end up in a back room with my friend, smoking crack until daybreak. I’ve never done it before, and I’ll never do it again, but it makes me feel like Superman for fifteen minutes at a time, full of self-confidence and charm, until the hit wears off and each nerve screams for more. Before I take the first lungful the guy with the lighter asks if I know what I’m doing, if I’ve done it before. He even tells me not to, tells me he hasn’t left that pipe for three days. I nod my head like I understand, like there’s nothing I don’t understand, as I fall back on the couch, my lungs now big with smoke.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GREGORY. Sometimes also in the holy Word by dogs are understood preachers; according to that, That the tongue of thy dogs may be red by the very blood of thy enemies; (Ps. 68:23. Vulg.) for the tongue of dogs while it licks the wound heals it; for holy teachers, when they instruct us in confession of sin, touch as it were by the tongue the soul’s wound. The rich man was buried in hell, but Lazarus was carried by angels into Abraham’s bosom, that is, into that secret rest of which the truth says, Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall lie down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom shall be cast into outer darkness. But being afar off, the rich man lifted up his eyes to behold Lazarus, because the unbelievers while they suffer the sentence of their condemnation, lying in the deep, fix their eyes upon certain of the faithful, abiding before the day of the last Judgment in rest above them, whose bliss afterwards they would in no wise contemplate. But that which they behold is afar off, for thither they cannot attain by their merits. But he is described to burn chiefly in his tongue, because the unbelieving people held in their mouth the word of the Law, which in their deeds they despised to keep. In that part then a man will have most burning wherein he most of all shews he knew that which he refused to do. Now Abraham calls him his son, whom at the same time he delivers not from torments; because the fathers of this unbelieving people, observing that many have gone aside from their faith, are not moved with any compassion to rescue them from torments, whom nevertheless they recognise as sons. AUGUSTINE. (Quæst. Ev. lib. ii. qu. 39.) By the five brothers whom he says he has in his father’s house, he means the Jews who were called five, because they were bound under the Law, which was given by Moses who wrote five books.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You will spend the next few years of your career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time—telling them to young readers in classrooms and audiences at bookstores; once, to a tenure-track job search committee. You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do. Traumhaus as LipogramIt’s hard, saying a story without a critical part. Thinking you can say what you want as you want to, but with a singular constraint. Loss of the function of a particular orthographic symbol—it’s a situation, hmm? A critical loss. Not just a car with bad paint, a lamp with a crack, sour milk. A car that can’t stop. A lamp that sparks. Milk cut with shit. A woman hid my thing and I can’t find it again. That’s just how it is. I cannot find what’s missing. I am trying and trying, and I cannot; as I fail, I shrink. I shrink down into dirt, wood, worms. It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know. Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin. Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say? (Also: Why did you stay?) I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison. Dream House as HypochondriaYou tell her she has to go to therapy or else you’re going to leave her. Sullen, she agrees. She does go, for a while. The first morning, you make her coffee and breakfast, so that she’s ready to head out into the world. You feel like a mother on her child’s first day of school. You sit there in your underwear and robe, contemplating the winter morning from the plate-glass window in her kitchen. She returns in a cheery mood, holding a second coffee; her nose and the tops of her ears blushing with winter. “What did the therapist say?” you ask. “I know I shouldn’t be asking, I just think—” “We’re still getting to know each other,” she says. “It’s too early to say.” Things get better for a little bit. They really do. She is attentive, kind, patient. She brings you treats—little foods, dips and things, your favorite—and leaves them for you to find when you wake up. A few weeks later, she tells you over the phone that she’s not going to continue therapy. “It’s too much time,” she says. “I’m really fucking busy.” “It’s one hour a week,” you say, gutted. “Besides, he says I’m totally fine,” she says. “He says I don’t need therapy.”37

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Santa Three : Buried most of it below a tree—I’m not telling you where, you bastard—but know it’s waiting, waiting for the dust to settle. Daughter One : The engine running, hot air blowing on my legs. Art cold? Thou art the thing itself, methinks. Inhale, exhale, the body’s steam, the engine inside, the soul manifest, the dream’s white cloud. I am cold myself. Daughter Two : For a few months after I got back from Mexico I seriously considered buying him a one-way ticket to Mexico City. Get him drunk one night and pour him into a bus while he’s passed out. Santa One : ( morose ) If there was any way I could snap my fingers and bring your mother back into this room…. Daughter One : ( touching SANTA TWO ) We got a live one here, I tell Jeff, as if it’s the first. I reach out and touch the shoulder, only after having whispered near, Hey, you need anything— Santa Two : ( sits up ) How about a fuckin apartment? You got one? Santa One : ( to SANTA TWO ) Don’t say a word, you cocksucker, don’t say word one. Daughter One : It’s Malachi, and Malachi’s barred for life, no parole. Attacked a cop in the building with a knife. Santa Four : ( bullhorn ) Man’s life is cheap as beasts’. Daughter One : Ah, Malachi, you pissed everyone off. Santa Two : You think I’ll weep? No, I’ll not weep. Daughter Two : Many do not know they have climbed a steep hill and now stand overlooking the rocks and sea below. Santa Five : ( grabs bullhorn from SANTA FOUR ) What is the cause of thunder? They all stop and stare at SANTA FIVE . Lights flicker . Daughter Three : On Day Five those still unsold are coated with chocolate. Very popular, especially among children and junkies, they line up on the Day Five, singing and scratching. The scrim flickers between donuts and morgue, stutters like it’s short-circuiting . Santa Four : ( wrests bullhorn back from SANTA FIVE , then whispers to DAUGHTERS ) Watch this. ( whispers through bullhorn ) Martin. Martin. Martin. SANTA FIVE starts, looks around frightened, covers his ears, runs behind mountain of shoes . Lights flicker . Santa One : Jesus Christ I miss her. I’m talking straight talk, numbhead. Daughter Two : It’d never work. I’d never get him to Mexico. Not enough vodka in the world to keep him unconscious that long. I’d have to kill him. Daughter One : Something must be sacrificed. Santa One : With the ass, with the ankles, with the feet. God, I miss her. Daughter One : Even moonshots jettison the spent engines to get home. Daughter Two : Buy him a jug, make sure he kills it. When he falls, make sure he falls face-first into a snowbank, take off his shoes, lose the jacket.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Miraculously, the Athenians managed to hold on. But over the next few years, severely imbalanced by the losses in Sicily, they staggered from one reeling blow to another, until finally in 405 BC Athens suffered its final loss and was forced to agree to the harsh terms of peace imposed by Sparta. Their years of glory, their great democratic empire, the Periclean golden age were now and forever over. The man who had curbed their most dangerous emotions— aggression, greed, hubris, selfishness—had been gone from the scene for too long, his wisdom long forgotten. • • • Interpretation: As Pericles surveyed the political scene early in his career, he noticed the following phenomenon: Every Athenian political figure believed he was rational, had realistic goals, and plans on how to get there. They all worked hard for their political factions and tried to increase their power. They led Athenian armies into battle and often came out ahead. They strove to expand the empire and bring in more money. And when their political maneuvering suddenly backfired, or the wars turned out badly, they had excellent reasons for why this had happened. They could always blame the opposition or, if need be, the gods. And yet, if all these men were so rational, why did their policies add up to so much chaos and self-destructiveness? Why was Athens such a mess and the democracy itself so fragile? Why was there so much corruption and turbulence? The answer was simple: his fellow Athenians were not rational at all, merely selfish and shrewd. What guided their decisions was their base emotions—hunger for power, attention, and money. And for those purposes they could be very tactical and clever, but none of their maneuvers led to anything that lasted or served the overall interests of the democracy. What consumed Pericles as a thinker and a public figure was how to get out of this trap, how to be truly rational in an arena dominated by emotions. The solution he came up with is unique in history and devastatingly powerful in its results. It should serve as our ideal. In his conception, the human mind has to worship something, has to have its attention directed to something it values above all else. For most people, it is their ego; for some it is their family, their clan, their god, or their nation. For Pericles it would be nous , the ancient Greek word for “mind” or “intelligence.” Nous is a force that permeates the universe, creating meaning and order. The human mind is naturally attracted to this order; this is the source of our intelligence. For Pericles, the nous that he worshipped was embodied in the figure of the goddess Athena.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  The Great Depression was just beginning, and for the first time as a mature Christian, Douglas encountered relentless suffering and poverty. õ In 1932, he attended the first convention of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a social democratic political party. Their vision was a society in which the people would collectively own major industries, and the common good would supplant the profit motive as the main driver of the economy. The CCF was the ancestor of Canada’s modern social-democratic party, the New Democratic Party. õ Douglas eventually entered Saskatchewan politics, where he pioneered many of the foundations of the Canadian welfare state. His greatest achievement was building a universal public healthcare system that became the foundation of Canada’s national healthcare program, Medicare. õ An interesting question is: Could Douglas have had such a successful career in the United States? Some Christian groups and leaders in American history did believe in greater regulation and a more generous social safety net. Some of these were socialist, but many others cast their goals in terms of equalizing opportunity (expanding education, regulating finance) rather than promising to nationalize industries. õ Additionally, there have been times of crisis when Americans have accepted a massive expansion of government involvement in their lives, such as the Great Depression and World War II. õ But by the time that Tommy Douglas was at the height of his career— the early Cold War—the word socialism was political poison in America. Now, Canada had its own tradition of anti-communism (the Mounties spied on Douglas for more than 30 years because of his links with left-wing causes). But in general, Canadians aren’t as suspicious of giving a lot of power to government bureaucrats. Lecture 22—The Social Gospel 219 õ Note: The Social Gospel has been just as consequential for American politics as for Canadian politics, but in a very different way. The Social Gospel tradition deeply influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. But in America, the Social Gospel has functioned more as a prophetic tradition, stirring up pressure for reform outside the centers of political power, rather than as an entrenched force within politics. SUGGESTED READING Carter, Union Made. Rieder, Gospel of Freedom. Thomas, ed., The Making of a Socialist. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä Do the concepts of original sin and social sin offer different explanations of suffering and injustice in the world? ä Do activists’ ideas grow out of their life experience, or do their experiences reflect their ideas—or both? ä Why did the Social Gospel seem so dangerous to conservative critics? 220 The History of Christianity II LECTURE 23 FUNDAMENTALISM AND PENTECOSTALISM This lecture focuses on the movements of Pentecostalism and fundamentalism. At first, both seem like simple reactions against liberal ideas. They seem like efforts to go back in time and defend an ancient view of Christianity—and they are that. But both were creatures of the 20th century, as well. 221

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “But I’ve told you that I believe you. I didn’t ask you about Minos Korva. I asked how many lights you see.” Picard squints upward. “There are four lights.” Gul Madred sighs like a disappointed parent. “I don’t understand how you can be so mistaken.” Picard squints against them and says, “What lights?” He spasms so hard his body leaps from the chair, strikes the floor. Lying on the floor, Picard mumble-sings a French folk song from his childhood. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.” On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing. “Where were you?” Madred asks. “At home. Sunday dinner. We would all sing afterward.” Madred opens the door and tells Picard he may go. But as Picard prepares to leave, Madred tells him he’ll torture Dr. Crusher instead. Picard returns to his chair. “Are you choosing to stay with me?” Madred asks. Picard is silent. “Excellent,” Madred says. “I can’t tell you how pleased this makes me.” Later, Madred feeds Picard. Boiled taspar egg, “a delicacy,” he says. When cracked open, it is an undulating, gelatinous mass with an eye at its center. Picard sucks the contents from the shell. Madred has his own meal; shares a story of his own childhood as a street urchin in Lakat, on the Cardassian homeworld. “In spite of all you have done to me,” Picard says with clarity, “I find you a pitiable man.” Madred’s cordial attitude vanishes. “What are the Federation’s defense plans for Minos Korva?” he shouts. “There are four lights!” Picard says. Gul Madred turns on the device, and Picard begins writhing. “How many do you see now?” Picard screams, weeps, sings. On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing. [image file=image_rsrc2K1.jpg] Back on the Enterprise, the crew has negotiated Picard’s release. In the final scene between Picard and Madred, Picard grabs the device that controls the pain, smashes it against a table. Madred calmly tells him it doesn’t matter; he has many more. “Still,” Picard says, “it felt good.” “Enjoy your good feelings while you can. There may not be many more of them.” Madred goes on to explain that a battle has commenced, and the Enterprise is “burning in space.” Everyone will assume you’ve died with them, Madred says, and so you will stay here forever. “You do, however, have a choice. You can live out your life in misery, held here, subject to my whims. Or you can live in comfort with good food and warm clothing, women as you desire them, allowed to pursue your study of philosophy and history. I would enjoy debating with you; you have a keen mind. It’s up to you. A life of ease, of reflection and intellectual challenge. Or this.” “What must I do?” Picard says. “Nothing, really,” Madred says. He glances upward, like he’s looking for rain before stepping out from under an awning. “Tell me … how many lights do you see?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  that, through lots of generous bribes, Rockefeller had gotten the Maryland legislature to give an exclusive pipeline charter to Standard Oil. This meant Tidewater would have to pass through the hillier and even mountainous areas farther north in Pennsylvania, making the route more circuitous and the job more expensive. Then, however, came the most threatening blow of all: Rockefeller suddenly went on a real estate buying spree, purchasing large tracts of farmland in Pennsylvania, right in the way of Tidewater’s advance to the sea. No price seemed too high for Standard Oil to pay. Benson did what he could to fight back and buy his own land, but rumors began to spread among the farmers in the area of the danger if they sold parts of their land to Tidewater—being so long, the pipeline would be subject to leaks that could ruin their crops. Clearly, Standard Oil was the source of the rumors, and they had an effect. To Benson, Rockefeller was like a relentless, invisible demon attacking him from all directions, ratcheting up the costs and the pressure. But Benson could be just as relentless. If Rockefeller bought out an entire valley, Benson made the pipeline change course, even if it meant going over more hills. The route became a ridiculous zigzag, but the pipeline kept inching its way east and finally reached the coast in May of 1879. Once the pipeline went into operation, however, no one could predict if its elaborate pumping system could move the oil up steep climbs. Slowly the first flow of crude oil made its way through the pipeline, ascending even the highest mountain, and after seven days the first drops reached the end point. The Tidewater Pipeline was considered one of the great engineering feats of the day, and Benson became an overnight hero. Finally someone had outwitted and outfought Standard Oil. To Benson’s amazement, however, Rockefeller now only ratcheted up the pressure. Tidewater had bled money and had little left in reserve, but here was Rockefeller drastically reducing rates on Standard Oil’s own pipelines and railroads, transporting oil virtually for free. Tidewater could not find a drop of oil to ship, and this was bringing the company to its knees. By March of 1880 Benson had had enough, and he struck a deal with Standard Oil on the most favorable terms he could get, joining the two companies. But this was only a preliminary move. In the months to come, Rockefeller bought up more and more shares in Tidewater, bringing it completely under his control. Like so many others before him, in trying to fight against Rockefeller, Benson had only made him stronger and more invincible. How could anyone hope to fight against such an indomitable force? — In the 1880s the demand for kerosene to light houses and offices exploded, and Rockefeller controlled the market. And in cities and towns across America, local grocers and retailers began to notice a revolutionary new system introduced by Standard Oil. The company

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Do you want a picture of a fawn? Will that help? Okay. Here’s a fawn. She is small and dappled and loose-legged. She hears a sound, freezes, and then bolts. She knows what to do. She knows there’s somewhere safer she can be. Go to this page. That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh; it reminds you of your first boyfriend who fucked you while watching porn—how he rutted and rutted and then every so often lifted the remote to rewind something you couldn’t see. (Once you turned your head over the lip of the bed and saw a tangle of upside-down limbs and your brain couldn’t make sense of them; you never looked again.) You would just lie there silently, watching his face move over you. It was like being unfolded beneath the yawn of the planetarium as a kid: the sped-up rotation of the earth, the movement of the stars over you, the constellations melting into and out of being as a distant, disembodied voice told some ancient story to help make sense of it all. You shudder and moan with precision. She turns off the lights. You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you; or you leave it. To sleep, go to this page. To dream about the past, go to this page. To dream about the present, go to this page. To dream about the future, go to this page. The first time it happened—the first time she yelled at you so much you were crying within thirty seconds from waking, a record—she said, “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe. Go to this page. It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to. Go to this page. You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t— Go to this page. You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The cigarette smolders between my fingers. Mist rises from the warm soil as I step through the crop. The sky widens, the tobacco drops off, revealing a circle no larger than god’s thumbprint. But nothing’s here. No cow, no sound, only the last crickets, far off now, the tobacco still in the morning air. I stand, waiting for the sound to make me true. Nothing. The heifer, the farm, the boy, the wreck, the war—had I made it all up, in a dream, only to wake up with it fused to my skin? Ma, I don’t know if you’ve made it this far in this letter—or if you’ve made it here at all. You always tell me it’s too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you’ve been through, you’d just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost. I know you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know if I do but I hope it’s real. Because then maybe you’ll come back here next time around. Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. Maybe then, in that life and in this future, you’ll find this book and you’ll know what happened to us. And you’ll remember me. Maybe. For no reason, I start to run, past the clearing, back into the tobacco’s stiff shade. My feet blurring into a small wind beneath me, I run. Even if no one I know is dead yet, not Trevor, not Lan, not my friends with the speed and heroin nowhere near their scarless veins. Even if the farm is not yet sold to make room for luxury condos, the barn not yet dismantled, its wood repurposed into craft furniture or to line the walls of trendy cafés in Brooklyn, I run.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  It has been implicitly assumed that psychological change occurs, primarily, through the vehicle of insight and understanding or through behavior modification. The study of mental processes has, however, proven to be of only limited value in helping people transform in the aftermath of trauma. Often people are left besieged with distressing symptoms for years. Lasting change, rather than being primarily a psychological, top-down process (i.e., starting from our rational thoughts, perceptions and disciplined behavior choices), occurs principally through bottom-up processing (where we learn to focus on physical/physiological sensations as they continuously evolve into perceptions, cognitions and decisions). Transformation occurs in the mutual relationship between top-down and bottom-up processing. As sentient beings, we own the latent capacity for a vital balance between instinct and reason. From this confluence, aliveness, flow, connection and self-determination come to pass. Trauma and Disembodiment Traumatized individuals are disembodied and “disemboweled.” They are either overwhelmed by their bodily sensations or massively shut down against them. In either case, they are unable to differentiate between various sensations, as well as unable to determine appropriate actions. Sensations are constricted and disorganized. When overwhelmed, they cannot discern nuances and generally overreact. When shut down, they are numb and become mired in inertia. With this habitual deadening, they chronically underreact even when actually threatened and are thus likely to be harmed multiple times. In addition, they may actually harm themselves in order to feel something— even if that something is pain. In the poignant 1965 film The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, an emotionally deadened Jewish Holocaust survivor who, despite his prejudice, develops affection for a young black man who works for him. When, in the last scene, the boy is killed, Sol impales his own hand on the sharp memo spindle that holds the bills so that he feels something, anything! § The constriction of sensation obliterates shades and textures in our feelings. It is the unspoken hell of traumatization. In order to intimately relate to others and to feel that we are vital, alive beings, these subtleties are essential. And sadly, it is not just acutely traumatized individuals who are disembodied; most Westerners share a less dramatic, but still impairing disconnection from their inner sensate compasses. In contrast, various eastern spiritual traditions have acknowledged the “baser instincts” not as something to be eliminated, but rather as a force available for transformation. In one book describing Vipassana meditation, a quote reads that the goal is in “purifying the mind of its baser instincts so that one begins to manifest the truly human spiritual qualities of universal goodwill, kindness, humility, love, equanimity and so on.” 134 What I believe the author means is that rather than renouncing the body, spiritual transformation emerges from a “refining” of the instincts. The essence of embodiment is not in repudiation, but in living the instincts fully, while at the same time harnessing their primordial raw energies to promote increasingly subtle qualities of experience.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  fort point (mountain of shoes) A mountain of shoes reaches nearly to the ceiling. In another corner a mountain of t-shirts beside a mountain of sweaters. Mountains of pants, suits and underwear rise up one floor above. Tectonic fashion plates colliding. These new mountains loom above where the men sleep. This is the “overflow” shelter, Fort Point, a warehouse just across the highway from Pine Street. The deal to transform it into an “overflow” shelter, to get the men off the floors of Pine Street, was negotiated with the city in 1987. Other shelters have opened as well—the Laundry Room at Boston City Hospital, where you sleep to the sound of dryers tumbling sheets through the night; the Round Church, where you are offered a stiff-backed chair, and if you doze and fall from the chair you are asked to leave; the Armory, where you sleep beside a locked room filled with machine guns and dynamite. By now nearly every church basement in every town in America is lined with at least a handful of folding cots. At dinner with Emily’s parents one night Ray will ask me how many homeless there are in America now. A million, I’ll estimate, maybe two. Four hundred million people in America, Ray bellows, even two million is an acceptable percentage. From the start Fort Point is like Australia—an island off the highway, floating on a cloverleaf off I-93, difficult to reach. Those who work there are cowboys, renegades, they make their own rules. Sometimes a guest who’s barred from Pine Street is given a second chance at Fort Point. A ten-story warehouse slated for demolition, directly in the path of what will be called the “Big Dig,” maybe it will last five years. To invest structurally in Fort Point is silly—to replace broken windows, leaking pipes, or even paint the walls. It takes on the feel of a theater set, the bare minimum to get the men fed, showered and into bed. The food is driven over from Pine Street in the same vans that transport the guys who cannot negotiate the highway, the ones who even if you walk them to the Mobil station on the corner and point to it, That building right there, draw a little map, still they walk off in the wrong direction. Truly a temporary shelter, which is perhaps ideal. Above the men sleeping at the doomed Fort Point (“the Fort”) rise the mountains of clothes. A couple of live-in staff workers tear open trashbags of donated cast-offs, toss them into the appropriate mountain, using shovels, rakes, mostly their hands. Another couple of guys are in charge of sizing the shoes and pants, marking the size on a piece of masking tape. A job with no end, for the mountains before them grow faster than they can measure. Finally it’s decided that some of these clothes should be sold to the Rag Man, sold by the pound, the money used to buy new socks and underwear.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Then, just before the speech starts, Obama comes into the room where you’re stewing. The bleachers are crowded but there is room on the top step, a place where you’re definitely not supposed to be standing because there is nothing behind it but air. Your strongest friends pull themselves up and help you follow. You look out over the crowd and see the president—your president—walking before the crowd. You’ve never seen him up close before. He waves and smiles and begins to speak, and the air in front of you glints with smartphone screens. You close your eyes. You can feel the metal of the bleacher step bending minutely below your feet like a tuning fork, and you think I am more than six feet from the ground. It would be so easy to die; a brief moment of faintness; a temporary abandonment of your body’s rigor. A man in front of you has a shirt on. “Obama ’08: He’s ready to go!” Yes, you think. Yes, she is. I know. The day you break up for the last and final time is the day Obama announces, publicly, that he supports marriage equality. It is a Wednesday in May 2012. Your little brother’s twenty-third birthday. Joe Biden had, unscripted, bumbled into a public statement of support a few days before. “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama says in that sweet, thoughtful, politician-y way that irritates the hell out of you and also makes you want to hug him. The first time you voted for him, in 2008, you woke up to the simultaneous news that he’d won, and that California had rejected the possibility of you marrying a woman. It was a sweet-sour morning; through the fog of a hangover, you watched his victory speech with your roommate. “I’m sorry about Prop 8,” she said softly. You shrugged. You celebrated him despite his position on gays marrying because he was the best thing possible at that moment; imperfect in a way that affected you but was generally good for the world. You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency. You were already a woman, so you knew. Occupying that space was your goddamned specialty. Years later, so sad and shattered, you laugh at his statement because you can’t think of what else to do. “Great timing,” you say to your laptop screen. “Thanks, dude.” You figure it out: you take a Xanax and sleep on and off for days.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In the bedroom you strip off your clothes, then go into the bathroom, lock the door. The shower hotter than you can stand. You are warmed immediately; the sound reminds you of a storm. Then she’s there. Maybe you didn’t lock the door properly, maybe you didn’t lock it at all—and she is still screaming. She rips the shower curtain down from its rings. You back up. You aren’t wearing your glasses so she is just this fuzzy pale mass and her mouth is a red hole. The water falls between you. “I hate you,” she says. “I’ve always hated you.” “I know,” you say. “I want you to leave this house right now.” “I can’t. I don’t have my car. My flight is tomorrow.” “Leave this house or I will make you leave.” “I’ll sleep on the floor. I’ll leave first thing. You won’t even know I’m here.” You slide down to the floor of the bathtub, sobbing, and she walks away. You sit there until the water hitting your body is icy. After a few minutes like that, you reach over and turn the handle to off, shivering. She comes into the bathroom again. When she gets close to you, reaches toward you, you realize she is naked. “Why are you crying?” she asks in a voice so sweet your heart splits open like a peach. Dream House as Soap OperaShe doesn’t remember, she tells you before you go to sleep. She remembers being at the bar, and then crouching over you naked. Everything in between is darkness. Dream House as Comedy of ErrorsThe next day, you wake up next to her. You pack, and try to convince her to get moving, because she has the car and you have a flight to catch. She is sullen, angry, snaps at you when you remind her that the airport is over an hour away. She takes her time. Puts on her makeup. Drives, for the first time in her life, very slowly.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  the piss of god Sometimes a man falls asleep in the midst of buttoning his jacket, his fingers hanging on to the last button. Sometimes, embedded in hot asphalt, you see a key, shined by the soles of pedestrians’ shoes. You check your pockets, suddenly worried. The sidewalk calls, using the trick of gravity to bring you to your knees, to close your eyes, to make you sleep. If there’s grass, if you can see it, each blade catches a sliver of streetlight, each blade wants you to hold on. Face-down you swear you can feel the earth spin, hold tight or you’ll spin off into outer space. Forget about ceilings, about walls, about doors, about keys. The bread you ate at lunch is already turning to soil inside you, nightsoil now, darkness hovering inside. Soon your flesh will crumble off you, those on their way to work the next morning will pass your whitened skeleton like so many styrofoam cups—bleached, perfect. If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. A bridge. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle’s eye to enter heaven, as easily as they pass into a box imagined into a house. Houses inside buildings, houses inside tunnels, some exist for only a day, some, miraculously, longer. This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is in an apartment, a man is in the box. Tomorrow the box will be flattened and tossed, you’ve seen the garbagemen stomping them down to fit into the truck. Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. Another bullshit night in suck city , my father mutters. And then there’s the Celtics, losing just across town. Last night Mackie had a la-z-boy set up in Rat Alley, watching a television hotwired into a light pole. My father stepped into Mackie’s living room, checked out a couple minutes of play—can these still be called the glory days of Bird? Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner—are you inside now or out? Position your chair before your television, take your walk, find your coffee, by morning it all will be gone—no inside no outside, no cardboard box no mansion, no birth no death, no container no contained, a Zen koan, a frikkin riddle. A garbage truck hauled the tv away, another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight. But a la-z-boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  automatic teller (1989) Please , she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks, Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly on the screen. Any card with a magnetic strip will let you in, all the street guys know this, or learn quick. It’s never night inside this room, the lights hum a deafening white. My father stands at the desk, filling out deposit slips— Five hundred to savings, twenty-five thousand to checking, all cash —then puts the slips in an envelope and tosses it into the trash. Drive past and it’s like a window display, a diorama— Late Twentieth Century Man Pretending to Be Banking —brought to you by the Museum of the Homeless. The people who enter, those with money to withdraw, most of them don’t even glance at my father, don’t give him a second look. Dressed well, clean, his graying hair long and swept back from his forehead—just like them, doing a little banking after midnight, on his way to an after-hours club, a late dinner, a lady waiting in the car, that car, by the curb, the engine running, the heat blowing on her legs while she listens to the radio— A little honey in my pot , or, Baby it’s cold outside . Skid is curled beneath the desk—semiconscious or out cold, hard to tell, his boombox cranked up full, he holds it tight to his chest like a screaming child. My father hums. The lights hum. The couple at the automatic teller kiss, the machine clicks out a small pile of bills, my father bends to his deposit slip, Six hundred and seventy thousand, cash , he puts it in an envelope, licks the envelope shut. The couple stand by the door, still kissing, like they have no place better to be, like this is the most romantic spot in the city. Others find their way to the ATM after midnight, after the last Dunkin’ Donuts closes. They rattle the magnetic door to get my father’s attention, but unless he knows them he’ll feign sleep or pretend he’s absorbed with his banking. After midnight it’s hard to find an open lobby, a dry place to enter, and for some it’s hard to scrounge even so much as a magnetic card. My father knows Beady-Eyed Bill, another harmless weirdo, unlatches the door. The Beady-Eyed One talks out of the side of his mouth, glancing over my father’s shoulder to scope what’s coming. He fears he’s being watched, and inside this room who can say he’s not? Someone behind that wall is making a goddamn movie of his life. Alice, hunched by the trash, swears people come in at night and carve their initials into her flesh. She holds an upturned palm to Bill accusingly, asks, Who’s “J.L.”? The scratches on her hand do look like the letters “J” and “L,” this is true. Bill glances at my father conspiratorially. Alice glares at Bill. And which Bill are you tonight? The one in the gray slacks, or the one that snuck in last night and branded my hand? My father, finished depositing his cash, curls up on the ceramic floor, turns his face to the baseboard, tucked below the window so the fake police won’t see him. Phony sheriff stars painted on their little jeeps, if he can stay below their line of sight it might buy ten minutes of sleep. In Boston the bars close at one. The next wave of revelers, more gregarious than the earlier crowd, bleary and headed home, push their way inside. Sometimes they give you a hassle, sometimes they flip you a few bucks. A little lit, sometimes they try to start up a conversation, sit on the floor next to you, offer you a drink, want to know your name. You seem like a regular guy, how’d you end up here? Where? my father asks.