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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  At the front steps, I take the keys from my bag and jostle the door open. It’s nearly midnight. The house sends over me a sheet of warmth, mixed with the sweet musk of old clothes. Everything quiet. The living room TV hums on mute, its blue washes over the empty couch, a half-eaten bag of peanuts on the seat. I shut off the TV, walk up the stairs, turn toward the room. The door’s ajar, revealing the glow of a clamshell night-light. I push it open. You’re lying, not on your bed, but on the floor, on a mat made of folded blankets. Your work at the nail salon has left your back so badly strained the bed has gotten too soft to hold your joints in place through a night’s sleep. I crawl next to you on the mat. Rain, collected in my hair, falls and blotches your white sheets. I lie down, facing the bed, my back to your back. You startle awake. “What? What are you doing? My god, you’re wet . . . your clothes, Little Dog . . . what? What’s going on?” You sit up, pull my face to you. “What happened to you?” I shake my head, smile stupidly. You search me for answers, for cuts, feeling my pockets, under my shirt. Slowly, you lie down on your side. The space between us thin and cold as a windowpane. I turn away—even if what I want most is to tell you everything. It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you. There’s a word Trevor once told me about, one he learned from Buford, who served in the navy in Hawaii during the Korean War: kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. Lying on the mat with you, I cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. But I know better. You place a sticky hand on my neck: lavender lotion. Rain drums the gutters along the house. “What is it, Little Dog? You can tell me. Come on, you’re making me scared.” “I hate him, Ma,” I whisper in English, knowing the words seal you off from me. “I hate him. I hate him.” And I start to cry. “Please, I don’t know what you’re saying. What is that?”

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

  cloverleaf The world’s so large, each city full of cheap rooms, each room behind a door. Men lie in these rooms, press their bodies into mattresses, pull the shade in the morning, pace wide-eyed at night. Someone always comes along, picks you up. You have to end up somewhere, right? Damn near law of physics. If not for his cab my father will be outside. I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be . Easy to sleep in the cab, his hands tight on the wheel. He’s not homeless, not yet, not ready for sleeping on the ground, not sober. Overnight the taxi becomes his room, the city his floor plan. Logan to Kenmore, Beacon Hill to Harvard Square, back to the garage in the Fenway to refuel, the great rotary of being, the cloverleaf of life. The plan is to live out of his cab, lease it twenty-four hours at a time, three back-to-back shifts. Park down by the waterfront, in Southie, in Winthrop, watch the planes take off, stash a bottle under the seat, drive to the storage unit, pick out some clothes to last a few days, eat a sandwich, drive. He still makes money—listening for the dispatcher, ferrying people here and there, driving past black men in suits with their hands in the air. If he has to shit in the middle of the day he goes to the Greyhound station, where no one notices a taxi parked out front for half an hour. A spot reserved for taxis. For a shower he goes to the Y in Charlestown, just over the bridge from the North End. Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast. It’s not all fun and games. Cabbies get shot in the head every night, everyone knows they have a pocketful of cash. Between the door and his seat he keeps his spiked club, where his left hand can find it quick— Bammo, spike to the jugular, lowlife won’t know what hit him . But one night in late March he forgets to stop drinking—meter on, meter off, blackout, awake. Another overnight in jail, to stand before the judge in the morning. The police said they found an empty fifth beside me. Said I hit someone or some fucking thing down by the Common. What could I say to that? A fine must be paid, damage made right, before he steps out into the cold sunshine without his hack license, a free man on probation. Boston, thankfully, is a small city, walkable. So he walks, up Beacon Hill to his post office box, to check in on the Fact Foundation, then along the mall on Commonwealth to Mass Ave, then down to his storage unit. It’s almost one by the time he makes it, by the time he changes into a new shirt it’s too far to walk to Charlestown for a shower. Besides, he’s hungry, after refusing the powdered eggs they offered him in the cell.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  He observed closely the extra swaying of the hips or the strut that seemed to elevate the head, indicating high levels of confidence in a person. There was the walk that people put on to cover up some weakness or insecurity—the exaggerated masculine stride, the nonchalant shuffle of the rebellious teenager. He took note of the sudden changes in people’s walk as they became excited or nervous. All of this supplied him endless information about people’s moods and self-confidence. In his office, he placed his desk at the far end of the room, making his patients walk toward him. He would notice changes in the walk from before to after the session. He would scrutinize their way of sitting down, the level of tension in their hands as they grasped the arms of the chair, the degree to which they would face him as they talked, and in a matter of a few seconds, without words being exchanged, he had a profound read on their insecurities and rigidities, as mapped clearly in their body language. At one point in his career, Erickson worked in a ward for the mentally disturbed. In one instance the psychologists there were perplexed by the case of a particular patient—a former businessman who had made a fortune and then lost everything because of the Depression. All the man could do was cry and continually move his hands back and forth, straight out from his chest. Nobody could figure out the source of this tic or how to help him. Getting him to talk was not easy and it led nowhere. To Erickson, however, the moment he saw the man he understood the nature of the problem—through this gesture he was literally expressing the futile efforts in his life to get ahead and the despair this had brought him. Erickson went up to him and said, “Your life has had many ups and downs,” and as he did so, he shifted the motion of the arms to up and down. The man seemed interested in this new motion and it now became his tic. Working with an occupational therapist on site, Erickson placed blocks of sandpaper in each of the man’s hands and put a rough piece of lumber in front of him. Soon the man became enthralled with the sanding of the wood and the smell of it as he polished it. He stopped crying and took woodworking classes, carving elaborate chess sets and selling them. By focusing exclusively on his body language and altering his physical motion, Erickson could alter the locked position of his mind and cure him. One category that fascinated him was the difference in nonverbal communication between men and women and how this reflected a different way of thinking.

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

  They say everything happens for a reason—but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living. I can’t tell you why some monarchs, on their way south, simply stop flying, their wings all of a sudden too heavy, not entirely their own—and fall away, deleting themselves from the story. I can’t tell you why, on that street in Saigon, as the corpse lay under the sheet, I kept hearing, not the song in the drag singer’s throat, but the one inside my own. “Many men, many, many, many, many men. Wish death ’pon me.” The street throbbed and spun its shredded colors around me. In the commotion, I noticed the body had shifted. The head fell to one side, pulling the sheet with it and revealing the nape of a neck—already pale. And there, just under the ear, no larger than a fingernail, a jade earring dangled, then stopped. “Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me. Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.” — I remember you grabbing my shoulders. How it was pouring rain or it was snowing or the streets were flooded or the sky was the color of bruises. And you were kneeling on the sidewalk tying my powder-blue shoes, saying, “Remember. Remember. You’re already Vietnamese.” You’re already. You’re all ready. Already gone. I remember the sidewalk, how we pushed the rusty cart to the church and soup kitchen on New Britain Ave. I remember the sidewalk. How it started to bleed: little drops of rouge appearing beneath the cart. How there was a trail of blood ahead of us. And behind us. Someone must have been shot or stabbed the night before. How we kept going. You said, “Don’t look down, baby. Don’t look down.” The church so far away. The steeple a stitch in the sky. “Don’t look down. Don’t look down.” I remember Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hands wet over mine. Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hand so hot. Your hand my own. I remember you saying, “Little Dog, look up. Look up. See? Do you see the birds in the trees?” I remember it was February. The trees were black and bare against an overcast sky. But you kept talking: “Look! The birds. So many colors. Blue birds. Red birds. Magenta birds. Glittered birds.” Your finger pointed to the twisted branches. “Don’t you see the nest of yellow chicks, the green mother feeding them worms?” I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn’t stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down.

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

  four headlong All over the city men are falling— nosedive , header —crab-walking from benches lower and lower until the ground rises up to catch them, until the earth says stop , until the sidewalk tilts and the lights go out. From above, with infrared, you can see them, the outlines of bodies dotting the city, falling to their knees, rolling onto their sides, frozen in a pantomime of sleep. Points on a map, an electrified tourist map, the scenic spots lit up, marked. Scan the corners, the edges, the just-out-of-sight, the places men go to piss, any horizontal will do. One of those lights could be my father, but he keeps moving, through the night, finds a stone mattress, dozes off.

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

  This is only one tradition in the incredibly varied landscape of African Christianity. Today about half of all Africans are some variety of Christian— that’s roughly 600 million people, and a lot of diversity. However, this lecture focuses on the prosperity gospel and some of the newer revival movements founded in the past century, because their practices and ideas have become so influential. They fall under the broad heading of prophetic religion. THE ALADURA MOVEMENT õ Olukoya’s father was a policeman, but he was also a pastor in a community of churches called the Christ Apostolic Church. One of Olukoya’s spiritual teachers was a leader in this church too. This is a church that was born in a revival called the Aladura movement. Aladura means “the Praying People” in the Yoruba language. 324 The History of Christianity II õ That movement has its roots in the year 1918, which saw the end of World War I. It was also the year of the global influenza epidemic, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide, including millions of Africans. It’s not hard to understand why some people might decide it was time to pray to God for some guidance. That’s how the Aladura movement started. A small group of Nigerian elders at St. Saviour’s Anglican Church in a town called Ijebu-Ode started holding prayer sessions. õ The Aladura leaders believed that they could use healing prayer to save people’s lives, and gradually their movement spread to other cities and into the countryside. After the flu epidemic subsided, another health crisis hit Nigeria in the mid-1920s: an outbreak of bubonic plague. And then came the global economic chaos of the Great Depression. õ People had lots of reasons to feel desperate and to be on the lookout for a hopeful sign from God. One person who felt sure he got that sign was a Nigerian man named Joseph Babalola. He worked for the public works department operating a steamroller. One day in 1928, while he was struggling to repair his machine, he heard Jesus Christ command him to abandon his job and become a prophet of God. õ That’s what he did. Babalola joined the Faith Tabernacle congregation in Lagos. He traveled around carrying a Yoruba Bible and a bell to summon listeners. Sometimes, he fasted for weeks at a time. Two years later, his growing band of followers claimed he had the power to heal lepers, cast out demons, and help the lame walk. Lecture 33—Prophetic Religion in Modern Africa 325

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

  THE CIVIL WAR õ After years of wrangling over policies both foreign and domestic, Charles finally prorogued Parliament in March of 1629—meaning he dismissed them and continued to go his own way. For the next 11 years, Charles managed to govern without summoning Parliament. But by 1641 Ireland had joined Scotland in open revolt. õ Charles finally had to face the fact that the landed gentry who dominated Parliament were the only ones with the power to collect taxes on a national scale. In other words, he had no choice but to call Parliament into session to try to raise more cash. õ By this point, Parliament had lost all faith in the king’s ability to lead an army or run the country. The members of Parliament (MPs for short) began passing a slew of laws to empower themselves and weaken the king. They decided to indict Laud on charges of treasonous acts and eventually had him beheaded. õ By the summer of 1642, civil war was looming: Charles was trying to round up an army, and English towns were declaring their allegiance to the king or to Parliament. The MPs who were most critical of the king started raising an army of their own. They were nicknamed the Roundheads for the Puritan fashion of wearing their hair cropped closely to their head. The royalists were known as the Cavaliers. õ At first things went okay for the royalists on the battlefield. But Charles still had his perennial problem: He was running out of money. Soon, the tide turned against his forces. In 1646, Scottish soldiers captured him and happily handed him over to the Roundheads. õ By January of 1649, King Charles was on trial for high treason, and he was beheaded at the end of the month. He became a martyr to many loyal subjects. Anything he had touched became a holy relic with healing powers, especially handkerchiefs dipped in his blood at the scene of his execution. 82 The History of Christianity II

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  continual battle that demanded all of Anton’s patience and love, for the self-destructive streak in the Chekhovs was deeply ingrained. It had led Nikolai to an early death from alcoholism, and without constant attention Alexander could easily follow the same path. Slowly Anton weaned him from drinking and helped him with his journalistic career, and eventually Alexander settled into a quiet and satisfying life. Sometime in 1884, Anton had begun to spit blood, and it was apparent to him that he had the preliminary signs of tuberculosis. He refused to submit to the examination of a fellow doctor. He preferred not to know and to go on writing and practicing medicine without worrying about the future. But as he became increasingly famous for his plays and short stories, he began to experience a new kind of discomfort—the envy and petty criticisms of his fellow writers. They formed various political cliques and endlessly attacked one another, including Anton himself, who had refused to ally himself with any revolutionary cause. All of this made Anton feel increasingly disenchanted with the literary world. The elevated mood he had so carefully crafted in Taganrog was dissipating. He became depressed and considered giving up writing entirely. Then, toward the end of 1889, he thought of a way to free himself from his growing depression. Since his days in Taganrog, the poorest and most abject members of society had fascinated him. He liked to write about thieves and con artists, and get inside their minds. The lowliest members of Russian society were its prisoners, who lived in ghastly conditions. And the most notorious prison in Russia was on Sakhalin Island, just north of Japan. It housed five penal colonies with hundreds of thousands of prisoners and their families. It was like a shadow state—nobody in Russia had any idea what really went on on the island. This could be the answer to his present misery. He would make the arduous trek across Siberia to the island. He would interview the most hardened criminals. He would write a detailed book on the conditions there. Far from the pretentious literary world, he would connect to something very real and reignite the generous mood he had crafted in Taganrog. His friends and family tried to dissuade him. His health had gotten worse; the travel could kill him. But the more they tried to dissuade him, the more he felt certain it was the only way to save himself. After a three-month journey he finally arrived at the island in July of 1890, and he immediately immersed himself in this new world. His task was to interview every possible prisoner, including the most vicious murderers. He investigated every aspect of their lives. He witnessed the most gruesome torture sessions of prisoners and followed convicts as they worked in the local mines, chained to wheelbarrows. Prisoners who completed their sentences would often have to stay on the island in labor camps, and so Sakhalin was full of

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

  I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it—perhaps even hold it up, like a tongue at the end of its word. — First developed as a painkiller for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, OxyContin, along with its generic forms, was soon prescribed for all bodily pain: arthritis, muscle spasms, and migraines. Trevor was into The Shawshank Redemption and Jolly Ranchers, Call of Duty and his one-eyed border collie, Mandy. Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, “I think I just deep-throated an invisible cock,” and we both cracked up like it wasn’t December and we weren’t under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange. Trevor was a boy who had a name, who wanted to go to community college to study physical therapy. Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was. The official cause of death, I would learn later, was an overdose from heroin laced with fentanyl. Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it. But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.” — One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. “Why they die themselves like that?” she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know it’s a cliff.” “Maybe they should have a stop sign then.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as VoidIt is hard to describe the space that yawns open in your life after she is gone. You have to make yourself leave your phone at home; you have to practice ignoring it. You keep reminding yourself that you are accountable to no one. You try to imagine sex with other people and struggle to visualize it; masturbation is near impossible.48 You wonder if you will ever be able to let someone touch you; if you will ever be able to reconnect your brain and body or if they will forever sit on opposite sides of this new and terrible ravine. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 48. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C947, Magic power lost by breaking taboo.Dream House as Unexpected KindnessYou have this really Republican uncle, Nick. Like, really, really Republican. Ann Coulter books on his coffee table, Fox News spewing technicolor paranoia into his living room, and a huge collection of guns that he insists on showing you because he knows it makes you uncomfortable. (You’ve never been able to explain to him the utter terror you felt the only time you shot a gun: an older guy you were crushing on took you out to a range and you both used a Glock to send old hard drives spinning to the dirt. You tried it because he’d said, “Most women are too small and slight to deal with this kind of kickback, but you’re strong and solid, so here you go.” You took the gun—because you were flattered by this assessment, because you wanted to sleep with him, because feminism—but then regretted it immediately. You were terrified; you felt like the gun was going to explode in your hand, kill both of you, and afterward you swore you’d never pick one up again. For a long time, that hunk of metal sat on your windowsill, sunlight streaming through the bullet hole. But when you moved you threw it away.) Nick lives in Wisconsin, and being in the Midwest you see him from time to time. You like him, despite yourself. He might represent everything you loathe, politically speaking, but he’s a giant teddy bear and he always calls you his “favorite Democrat,” even though you haven’t identified that way since college.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  St. Aignan being in England, and finding himself condemned to death in France, so managed by his ser- vices to gain the goodwill of several great lords, and set his wife's relations to work to such purpose, that the King of England entreated the King of France to par- don him and to restore him to his possessions and his honours. The king having been informed of the atrocity of this affair, sent the details of the process to the King of England, and begged him to consider if the crime was one which could be pardoned ; adding, that through- out his realm none but the Duke of Alengon alone had the privilege of granting grace in his duchy. The King of England did not yield to these representations, but so urgently solicited St. Aignan's pardon that at last he obtained it. On his return home, to fill up the measure of his wickedness, the proctor made acquaintance with a sor- cerer named Gallery, hoping to be put by him in a way to escape payment of the fifteen hundred crowns due by him to his victim's father. To this end, he and his wife went in disguise to Paris; but the wife, seeing how he often shut himself up for a long time with Gallery without saying a word to her, watched them one morn- ing, and saw Gallery set before her husband five wooden images, three of which had their hands hanging down, and two had them raised. " We must have waxen images made like them," said Gallery to St. Aignan ; " those which shall have their arms hanging down will be for the persons we shall cause to die ; and those with raised arras will be for the persons whose goodwill we seek." ,0 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Novell "Very well," said the proctor. "This one, then .shall be for the king, by whom I would be favoured, and this one for Monsieur Brinon, Chancellor of Alen ^on. " The images," said Gallery, " must be put under the altar, where they will hear mass, with certain words which I will teach you at the proper time."

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  sicians, a class of men on whose hands hangs not the health of men, began to despair on account of an ob' struction of the spleen, which rendered her melancholy, and they advised the husband to warn his wife to think of her conscience, saying that she was in the hands of God ; as if people in good health were not there also. The husband, who was excessively fond of his wife, was so overwhelmed at this news that he wrote, for his own consolation, to M. D'Avannes, begging he would take the trouble to come and see them, in the hope that his presence would be a comfort to the patient. M. D'Avan- nes, on receipt of the letter, instantly started off post- haste, and on entering the house, he found the domestics of both sexes as full of grief for their mistress as she deserved. Shocked at what he saw, he remained at the door as if paralyzed, until his good father came and em- braced him with tears, and without being able to utter a word, led him to the sick woman's chamber. Turning her languid eyes full upon him, she held out her hand, and drew hira towards her with all the little strength left her. " The moment is come, my lord," she said, embracing him, "when all dissimulation must cease, and I must declare to you the truth I have had so much difficulty in concealing ; it is, that if you have had much love for me, I have had no less for you. But my pain is greater than yours, because I have been compelled to hide it. Conscience and honour have never allowed me to declare to you the sentiments of my heart, for fear of augment- ing in you a passion which I wished to diminish. But know, my lord, that the no which I have said to you so often, and which it has cost me so much pain to pro- nounce, is the cause of my death. I die with satis- faction, since, by God's grace, notwithstanding the 2 68 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE \Ncrcel 2^

• 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.