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 In the Dream House (2019)

  “Sweet squid! The mistakes that I have made number in the thousands, I think. I have spent many days meditating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you. The truth is, you are my past and my future. I miss you. I wish I could suckle your tentacles and kiss your cool mantle, and that we could travel like we used to. I’m so sorry about the bear. The bear is beautiful and very special in her own right but she is nothing like you. She is still here in the castle but when I pass by her I have a strong desire to turn and run in the opposite direction. It is only you I want, my little cabbage. Not that I want to eat you, ha-ha! I just want you nestled in my stomach for all eternity. Please come back to me. Come back to me and I will pledge myself to you as I knew I should have many months ago. I have been a fool, but please, help me be a fool no longer. Marry me. And when we die our bodies will be scattered in the heavens as twin constellations, the queen and the squid, and no one will have known happiness like ours. I love you, I love you, my sweet darling, I love you. Faithfully and Truly, Your Queen.” After receiving this last letter, the squid began to construct a reply. She spent many hours writing and discarding drafts of letters; some took longer than others. She lamented the use of her ink for such an exhausting and pointless purpose. Eventually, she penned words that satisfied her. She sent her letter off by messenger and then made her way to a local farmer. There, she exchanged coin for a horse and a waterproof bladder that could be suspended from the saddle. The squid slurped into the skin and bade farewell to the town where she had suffered so. When the letter arrived, the queen opened it with trembling hands. “My queen,” the letter said, “your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.” Here is a story I learned from a bear: There was a queen, and she was lonely again. Dream House as Thanks, ObamaRight before the breakup, Barack Obama visits Iowa City. He comes to talk about student debt, and you are a student and you have so many kinds of debt, so you go. Your heart feels like a picked-off scab hot with infection. You get there late and are shuffled into an overflow room, where his speech will be viewable on a screen. You’re mad at yourself for being late, sad to be shunted off into another room. It feels, like so many things these days, a sign.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as MythWhen you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness or an encyclopedia peddler.49 Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated.50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible? You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things. Once, a woman drunkenly touches your elbow at a party and says, “I believe you,” in your ear, and you cry so hard you have to leave. You walk home in the dark over a footbridge and see a fat raccoon waddling up the riverbed. The raccoon is a trickster; everyone knows that. He doesn’t look up, he doesn’t speak to you, he just keeps going. But keeping going is a way of speaking. You hear him. He’s saying you will fight this fight for the rest of your days. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 49. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C423.3, Taboo: revealing experiences in other world.50. “Experiencing the ordinary brutality of love does not make one a victim. It makes one an adult,” Maureen Dowd wrote of Joyce Maynard, when Maynard published a memoir about how a decades-older J. D. Salinger seduced, abused, and disposed of her when she was eighteen. What, I wonder, is Maureen’s definition of ordinary? Brutality? Love?Dream House as Death WishAfterward—when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House—you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. This is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme.

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

  õ Russia was home to some more unusual religious minorities. Three examples are: ✳ The Old Believers, who were members of a small, conservative sect that broke away from the Russian church in the 1650s, when the patriarch decided to reform some of the holy books and details of worship. This is known as the Raskol, or schism. ✳ Another group, the Doukhobors, rejected almost all the basic tenets of Christianity and civil authority. They believe that God’s spirit illuminates every human being, and therefore violence against another person is not allowed. When they ceremonially burned all their weapons in 1895 and swore they would never fight for the tsar, the local authorities thought it was the start of a rebellion. An army of Cossacks was dispatched and drove the Doukhobors into exile. ✳ A third group, the Skoptsy, took their name from the Russian verb meaning “to castrate.” The Skoptsy preached castration—or, for women, the amputation of breasts—as a “seal” that bonded members to Christ and restored them to the purity of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall tainted human sexuality. Not all members took their devotion to the movement this far, but many did. Some parents even castrated their own children. õ The historian Laura Engelstein puts the Skoptsy in a larger religious and social context. It may sound crazy to voluntarily undertake their dangerous procedures—let alone inflict them on a child—but at a time when the life of most Russian peasants and workers was full of unpredictable violence and disease, there may have been something appealing in choosing the terms of one’s suffering. õ After the 1905 toleration law was adopted, some Skoptsy exiles were allowed to return to their homes, but the Russian authorities still kept a close watch on them and limited their movements. 244 The History of Christianity II THE EVE OF REVOLUTION õ The dissenting groups discussed previously accounted for a fairly small proportion of the Russian population. On the eve of revolution, about 65 percent of Russians were at least nominal Orthodox Christians. About 10 percent were Muslim or Jewish, although different scholars will quote slightly different statistics on these matters. Still, we can be sure that the Russian Orthodox Church played a significant role in the lives of many, many people. õ A range of Russian intellectuals were debating the church’s encounter with modernity; some even suggested that the Russian church was on the verge of a Western-style Reformation. They called for “churchless Christianity,” a “modern” faith in which an individual’s salvation did not depend so entirely on the institutions of the church. Lecture 25—The Church and the Russian Revolution 245

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

  I answer that, The fact that a sin cannot be taken away by Penance may happen in two ways: first, because of the impossibility of repenting of sin; secondly, because of Penance being unable to blot out a sin. In the first way the sins of the demons and of men who are lost, cannot be blotted out by Penance, because their will is confirmed in evil, so that sin cannot displease them as to its guilt, but only as to the punishment which they suffer, by reason of which they have a kind of repentance, which yet is fruitless, according to Wis. 5:3: “Repenting, and groaning for anguish of spirit.” Consequently such Penance brings no hope of pardon, but only despair. Nevertheless no sin of a wayfarer can be such as that, because his will is flexible to good and evil. Wherefore to say that in this life there is any sin of which one cannot repent, is erroneous, first, because this would destroy free-will, secondly, because this would be derogatory to the power of grace, whereby the heart of any sinner whatsoever can be moved to repent, according to Prov. 21:1: “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord: whithersoever He will He shall turn it.” It is also erroneous to say that any sin cannot be pardoned through true Penance. First, because this is contrary to Divine mercy, of which it is written (Joel 2:13) that God is “gracious and merciful, patient, and rich in mercy, and ready to repent of the evil”; for, in a manner, God would be overcome by man, if man wished a sin to be blotted out, which God were unwilling to blot out. Secondly, because this would be derogatory to the power of Christ’s Passion, through which Penance produces its effect, as do the other sacraments, since it is written (1 Jn. 2:2): “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.” Therefore we must say simply that, in this life, every sin can be blotted out by true Penance. Reply to Objection 1: Esau did not truly repent. This is evident from his saying (Gn. 27:41): “The days will come of the mourning of my father, and I will kill my brother Jacob.” Likewise neither did Antiochus repent truly; since he grieved for his past sin, not because he had offended God thereby, but on account of the sickness which he suffered in his body. Reply to Objection 2: These words of Augustine should be understood thus: “So great is the stain of that sin, that man is unable to humble himself in prayer,” i.e. it is not easy for him to do so; in which sense we say that a man cannot be healed, when it is difficult to heal him. Yet this is possible by the power of God’s grace, which sometimes turns men even “into the depths of the sea” (Ps. 67:23).

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  conscience pricked by what he had seen in Birmingham. Shortly after the settlement, he addressed the nation on television, explaining the need for immediate progress in civil rights and proposing some ambitious new laws. This led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It made King the undisputed leader of the civil rights movement, and soon a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Money now poured into the SCLC, and the movement seemed to have ineluctable momentum. But as before, the troubles and burdens for King only seemed to increase with each new victory. In the years following Birmingham he sensed a powerful reaction forming among conservatives and Republicans against the gains of the movement. They would work to halt further progress. He learned that the FBI had placed listening devices in his hotel rooms and had spied on him for years; they were now leaking stories and rumors to various newspapers. He watched as America descended into cycles of violence, starting with the assassination of Kennedy. He saw a new generation of black activists emerge under the banner of Black Power, and they criticized his adherence to nonviolence as weak and antiquated. When King moved the campaign to Chicago to try to stop discriminatory housing practices there, he brokered a settlement with local authorities, but black activists around the country harshly criticized him—he had settled for far too little. Shortly after this, an audience at a Chicago Baptist church loudly booed him, drowning out his talk with chants of “Black Power.” He grew depressed and despondent. In early 1965, he saw images of the Vietnam War in a magazine, and it sickened him. Something was deeply wrong with America. That summer he toured the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles after the violent riots that had scorched the area. The sight of so much poverty and devastation overwhelmed him. Here in the heart of one of the most affluent cities in America, the center of the fantasy industry, was an enormous neighborhood where large numbers of people lived in poverty and felt no hope for the future. And they were largely invisible. America had a cancer in its system—extreme inequalities in wealth, and the willingness to spend vast sums of money on an absurd war, while blacks in inner cities were left to rot and riot. His depression now mixed with growing anger. In his conversations with friends, people noticed a new edge to him. In one retreat with his staff, he said, “All too many people have seen power and love as polar opposites. . . . [But] the two fulfill each other. Power without love is reckless, and love without power is sentimental.” At another retreat, he talked of new tactics. He would never abandon nonviolence as the means, but the civil disobedience campaign would have to be altered and intensified. “Nonviolence must mature to a new level . . . mass civil disobedience. There must

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In this way, they experience agency, satisfaction and pleasure. When a child is overwhelmed by trauma or thwarted by neglect, this developmental sequence is aborted or, if already developed, breaks down; and negative emotions come to dominate his or her existence . After being traumatized, a child’s relationship with his or her body often becomes formless, chaotic and overwhelming; the child loses a sense of his internal structure and nuance. As the body freezes, the “shocked” mind and brain become stifled, disorganized and fragmented; they cannot take in the totality of experience and learn from it. These children, who have become “stuck” at some point along a once meaningful and purposeful course of action, engage in habitually ineffective and often compulsive patterns of behavior. These often play out in symptoms like those of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. The child’s uncoordinated fragmented efforts are not registered as normal, explicit, narrative memories but rather are encoded in the body as implicit, procedural memories including discomfort, constriction, distress, awkwardness, rigidity, flaccidity and lack of energy. Such memories are encoded not primarily in the neocortex but, instead, in the limbic system and brain stem. For this reason behaviors and memories cannot be changed by simply changing one’s thoughts. One must also work with sensation and feeling—really with the totality of experience. The SIBAM Model Human beings, in general, and therapists, in particular, make contact through a kind of “body resonance.” As described in Chapter 4 , we humans are programmed to experience sensations similar to those of people with whom we are in close proximity. 85 Imagine the scenario of being in a room filled with anxious conspiracy theorists as compared to one with blissful, meditating monks. Resonance forms the basis for the empathic attunement needed to form intimate relationships. 86 In treating traumatized individuals, a therapist first needs to cultivate a deep and enduring relationship with his or her own body. Only when a therapist’s embodiment skills are intact and engaged can he or she mentor and self-empower a client. Similarly, by refining their own capacity to observe the subtle behaviors of others , therapists can provide their clients feedback that helps them become aware of their sensations and feelings. Together, these two tools— somatic resonance and subtle observation —are of incalculable power and benefit. In the words of the analyst Leston Havens, “Perhaps the most striking evidence of successful empathy is the occurrence in our bodies of sensations that the patient has described in his or hers.” 87 During the 1970s, I developed a model that allowed me to “track” the processes whereby my clients processed experiences.

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

  These errors seem to have arisen from a twofold source: first from not knowing the nature of true Penance. For since true Penance requires charity, without which sins are not taken away, they thought that charity once possessed could not be lost, and that, consequently, Penance, if true, could never be removed by sin, so that it should be necessary to repeat it. But this was refuted in the [4730]SS, Q[24], A[11], where it was shown that on account of free-will charity, once possessed, can be lost, and that, consequently, after true Penance, a man can sin mortally. Secondly, they erred in their estimation of the gravity of sin. For they deemed a sin committed by a man after he had received pardon, to be so grave that it could not be forgiven. In this they erred not only with regard to sin which, even after a sin has been forgiven, can be either more or less grievous than the first, which was forgiven, but much more did they err against the infinity of Divine mercy, which surpasses any number and magnitude of sins, according to Ps. 50:1,2: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy: and according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my iniquity.” Wherefore the words of Cain were reprehensible, when he said (Gn. 4:13): “My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon.” And so God’s mercy, through Penance, grants pardon to sinners without any end, wherefore it is written (2 Paral 37 [*Prayer of Manasses, among the Apocrypha. St. Thomas is evidently quoting from memory, and omits the words in brackets.]): “Thy merciful promise is unmeasurable and unsearchable . . . (and Thou repentest) for the evil brought upon man.” It is therefore evident that Penance can be repeated many times. Reply to Objection 1: Some of the Jews thought that a man could be washed several times in the laver of Baptism, because among them the Law prescribed certain washing-places where they were wont to cleanse themselves repeatedly from their uncleannesses. In order to disprove this the Apostle wrote to the Hebrews that “it is impossible for those who were once illuminated,” viz. through Baptism, “to be renewed again to penance,” viz. through Baptism, which is “the laver of regeneration, and renovation of the Holy Ghost,” as stated in Titus 3:5: and he declares the reason to be that by Baptism man dies with Christ, wherefore he adds (Heb. 6:6): “Crucifying again to themselves the Son of God.” Reply to Objection 2: Ambrose is speaking of solemn Penance, which is not repeated in the Church, as we shall state further on ([4731]XP, Q[28], A[2]).

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

  These are just the ones we can name, the ones we know. In a few years we will begin holding a memorial service for them, reading off the names of those we can remember, mostly as a way to stave off our own sense of desperation, of hopelessness. We will build two hundred crosses in my loft, paint them white, paint the name of someone who had died on each one, hammer them into the Common one night, an instant graveyard.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  174 Lecture 40: Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan The point is illustrated in the scenes with her lover, Yang Sun, who wants both Shen Te’s goodness and Shui Ta’s money simultaneously—which is of course impossible, since they are the same person. He cannot have both at the same time, nor can we, nor can Shen Te herself, which is the point of the play. When Shen Te becomes pregnant, she more or less permanently disappears in favor of her ruthless cousin, Shui Ta, who is eventually accused of killing her. It is metaphorically appropriate that he be tried for her murder, since it is only by “killing off” the good woman of Setzuan that the business has been able to grow. At the trial scene, both Shen Te and Shui Ta admit that Shen Te’s focus has changed: She began by assuming her cousin’s role only to be able to be charitable, but she has learned that goodness is incompatible with survival. As always, survival takes precedence over charity—especially when there is her unborn child in the picture. Goodness as a value, the play suggests, cannot survive without fundamental social and economic changes. The play also insists that solutions for this dilemma have to come from humans themselves, not from the gods or religion. The gods are not interested in helping people, only in validating their own laws so that they can go back to heaven and the world can go on as it is. The situation is similar to that in Goethe’s Faust, where God will be satis ¿ ed with his creation if he can ¿ nd one good person; here the gods will assume that everything is ¿ ne if one good person can be found. The gods represent ¿ xed moral absolutes, which do not allow for any À exibility. Even good people in Setzuan have compromised in some ways just to stay alive; what makes Shen Te remarkable is that she really tries to be good and hopes, as religious people do, that the gods will in some way help good people (in one of her songs, Shen Te asks why the gods are not indignant at what happens on Earth). At the end the gods are satis¿ ed that Shen Te is a good person, which makes goodness possible, and they go back to heaven on a pink cloud. The gods simply wind up defending the status quo (the rich and powerful), which Brecht feels is what religion does. The gods even become comic ¿ gures as the play progresses, suggesting their retreat from relevance.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  She says she is in town to see you, that she wants to be with you, and you bring a box of her things to leave with her but end up staying instead. You scream at her, and cry. At some point, there is a knock on the door. You open it, and a slow-speaking, square-headed Iowa City bro stands on the other side. He has a strange, eerie smile. He says that the two of you should come party with his friends, do you want to come on over? They have booze, and other things. You don’t learn what the other things are, you just close the door. You stand there for a second, then flip the deadbolt. She comes up behind you, to hug you. You pull away so hard you smash into the door. You turn and slide down to the floor and she says, “Shhhh, shhhh,” and you beg her not to touch you, but she does. She leans in to your head. “Did you change your shampoo?” she asks, and you nod because you have. You have sex with her because you don’t know what else to do; you only speak the language of giving yourself up. “This will work,” she says to you as she touches you. “Amber means nothing to me. When I think about her, I feel sick. This will work, I promise. I love you so much.” The morning after, you go to a restaurant next door. A gorgeous baby coos from the adjacent vinyl booth, and it makes you cry so hard the waitress writes with a blue pen on your Styrofoam box of leftovers: Have a beautiful day! Maria. You are startled because she’s written your middle name, and you think to yourself that she’s sending you a message before you realize it is her first name. You take the box of her things back to your car, drive home. A week later—after you’ve convinced yourself that everything is going to be okay and you’ve gotten a new phone—you run into a woman who asks if your girlfriend has found an apartment yet, since she’s been here in town, looking. You are confused, but then later that night, when a friend tells you about a rumor she’s heard through the grad-school grapevine—your girlfriend is dating Amber, back in Indiana—you realize so many things all at once: She is not planning on moving in with you. You have made some bad choices. You call her, tell her what you know. Even here, on this incontrovertible hook, she equivocates so smoothly you can barely see her squirm. It is, she explains, merely complicated. She simply has too many wonderful things in her life; she is having difficulty making sense of it all. “I cannot be an attentive girlfriend while I love someone else,” she says, finally, and then it is over for good.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Demonic PossessionYou have always been interested in demon and possession narratives, no matter how cheesy or silly they are. It’s the perfect intersection of your morbid curiosities and the remnants of your religious upbringing; a reminder of a time when you believed in that sort of thing. After she blames those nights on a kind of amnesia, you do research while she mopes around. She feels bad, so bad, she says. There is remorse there, true remorse, and yet sometimes you catch her composing her face into sadness. You google memory loss, sudden onsets of rage and violence. The internet gives you nothing, except one article about how it has been shown that heavy marijuana use can, theoretically, trigger an onset of schizophrenia, if one were already genetically prone to it. This is terrifying; you feel deeply for her. You try to present your various theories, but she scoffs at all of them. She hasn’t been smoking much pot, she says. She doesn’t have schizophrenia. She says it with such disdain you begin to wonder if you’d exaggerated the events of that trip, whether perhaps you are remembering them wrong. This is not to say that you seriously consider demonic possession. You are a modern woman and you don’t believe in God or any accompanying mythologies. But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the next day? “I did what? I masturbated with a crucifix? I spit on a priest?” That’s what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she’s done without seeing horror on their faces. “But she was possessed, see.” “Oh well, that happens to everyone at one time or another, doesn’t it?” At night, you lie next to her and watch her sleep. What is lurking inside? Dream House as Naming the AnimalsAdam had one job, really. God said, “See this fuzzy thing? And that scaly thing there, in the water? And these feathery things, flying through the air? I really need you to give them names. I’ve been making the world for a week and I’m exhausted. Let me know what you decide.” So Adam sat there. What a puzzler, right? It’s obvious to us, now, that that is a squirrel and that is a fish and that is a bird, but how was Adam supposed to know that? He wasn’t just newly born, he was newly created; he didn’t have years of life experience to support this creative enterprise, or anyone to teach him about it. When I think about him, just sitting there with his brand-new fist under his brand-new chin, looking vaguely perturbed and puzzled and anxious, I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Many people argued that the issue needed to be handled within their own communities. Ink was spilled in the service of decentering victims, and abusers often operated with impunity. In an early lesbian domestic abuse trial, a lawyer noted the odd and unsettling detail that most of the time the jury spent behind closed doors was—contrary to what she’d been worried about—the straight jurors attempting to convince the jury’s sole lesbian member of the defendant’s guilt. When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman. Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 45. Among the myths tackled by the Santa Cruz Women’s Self Defense Teaching Cooperative: “Myth: It’s only emotional/psychological, so that doesn’t count.” “Myth: I can handle it—unlike her last three lovers.” “Myth: Staying together and working it out is most important.” “Myth: We’re in therapy, so it’ll get fixed now.”46. Actual questionnaire language by researcher Alice J. McKinzie: “Is your abuser present at this festival? If your abuser is at this festival, is she present while you are filling this out? If your abuser is not present while you are filling this out, is she aware that you are filling out this questionnaire? If you answered NO to the question above … do you plan to tell her later?”47. This No True Scotsman fallacy could bend these narratives in every direction conceivable; create a kind of moving goalpost that permitted an endless warping of accountability. In a firsthand account of her abuse in Gay Community News in 1988, a survivor wrote: “I had been around lesbians since I was a teenager, and although some of them had troubled relationships, I was unaware of any battering. I attached myself to the comforting myth that lesbians don’t batter. Much later, when I was ‘out’ enough to go to gay bars in a town that was liberal enough to tolerate them, I saw that some lesbians did indeed batter. However, I thought they were all of a type—drunks, sexist butches or apolitical lesbians—so I decided that feminist lesbians don’t batter.” Activist Ann Russo put it more succinctly in her book Taking Back Our Lives: “I had found it hard to name abuse in lesbian relationships as a political issue with structural roots.”Dream House as the Queen and the SquidHere is a story I learned from a squid: There was a queen, and she was lonely again. So she summoned all of her counselors, who then summoned all of the personages in the land so she could find a companion of her very own.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Long after the video came out, in 1999 the song’s producer revealed that the initial demo of the song had used female pronouns—in the original version, Mann was singing about a woman. “The record company was predictably unhappy with such lyrics,” he wrote, “since this was a very powerful, commercial song and they would prefer as many of its components as possible to swim in the acceptable mainstream. I wasn’t certain what to think about the pressure to change the gender of the love interest, but eventually thought that it didn’t matter any to the impact of the song itself. Would a quasi-lesbian song have had any effect on the liberation of such homosexuals, then as now several difficult steps behind the gays on the path towards broad social acceptance? I don’t think so, but it was hard to judge at the time. “If there is nothing social to be gained,” he continued, “there’s little point in risking that people might lose the main plot and be confused by something that might be peripheral to them. Maybe better to pull them in, subversively, as the best pop music does. How many more people are now sympathetic to gay people’s issues because they responded to gay artists who didn’t obviously fly the flag but expressed universal human sentiments that appealed to all? We respond to a song’s humanity first, and that is what matters.” Twenty-seven years later—decades into her solo career—the pretense was dropped. Mann released an album, Charmer, which included the song “Labrador.” The music video was a shot-for-shot remake of “Voices Carry,” with the triteness heightened for comedic effect. The introduction—in which a greasy, boorish director admits he tricked Mann into doing the remake against her will—is genuinely funny. But the song itself is just as sad as “Voices Carry,” if not more so: the speaker can’t help but return to her abusive lover, doglike, over and over again. “I came back for more,” Mann sings. “And you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in / Cause I’m a Labrador / And I run / When the gun / Drops the dove again.” The song opens addressed to someone Mann calls “Daisy.” Despite all of this—the suppressed representation, the hackneyed ’80s weirdness of the video—“Voices Carry” portrays verbal and psychological abuse in a clear and explicable way. The mania of abuse—its wild emotional shifts, the eponymous cycle—is in the very marrow of the music: dampened, minor-inflected verses without a clear key resolving into a shimmering major chorus before locking back down again. It is not the ironically upbeat prettiness of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)”—produced in 1963 by Phil Spector, who later murdered actress Lana Clarkson for spurning his advances—though that is its own musical metaphor. Both songs, despite the darkness of their subject, are catchy and endlessly singable.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  gentility. Agents and publishers came calling, and the most prestigious magazines accepted her stories. After Iowa, Flannery moved to the East Coast, settling in a country house in Connecticut owned by her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, who rented out a room to her. There, without distractions, she began to work feverishly on her first novel. The future seemed so full of promise, and it was all going according to the plan she had laid out for herself after the death of her father. At Christmas of 1949 she returned to Milledgeville for a visit, and once there she fell quite ill, the doctors diagnosing her with a floating kidney. It would require surgery and some recovery time at home. All she wanted was to get back to Connecticut, to be with her friends, and to finish her novel, which was becoming increasingly ambitious. Finally, by March, she was able to return, but over the course of the next few months she experienced strange bouts of pain in her arms. She visited doctors in New York, who diagnosed her with rheumatoid arthritis. That December she was to return to Georgia once again for Christmas, and on the train ride home she fell desperately ill. When she got off the train and was met by her uncle, she could barely walk. She felt as if she had suddenly turned elderly and feeble. Racked with pain in her joints and suffering high fevers, she was admitted immediately to a hospital. She was told it was a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, and that it would take months to stabilize her; she would have to remain in Milledgeville for an indefinite period. She had little faith in doctors and was not so sure of their diagnosis, but she was far too weak to argue. The fevers made her feel as if she were dying. To treat her, the doctors gave her massive doses of cortisone, the new miracle drug, which greatly alleviated the pain and the inflammation in her joints. It also gave her bursts of intense energy that troubled her mind and made it race with all kinds of strange thoughts. As a side effect, it also made her hair fall out and bloated her face. And as part of her therapy, she had to have frequent blood transfusions. Her life had suddenly taken a dark turn. It seemed to her a rather strange coincidence that when the fevers were at their highest, she had the sensation that she was growing blind and paralyzed. Only months before, when she was not yet ill, she had decided to make the main character in her novel blind himself. Had she foreseen her own fate, or had the disease already been there, making her think such thoughts? Feeling death at her heels and writing at a fast pace while in the hospital, she finished the novel, which she now called Wise Blood , inspired by all of the transfusions she had undergone. The novel

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  1416 01:10:50,879 --> 01:10:53,816 when she appears on the front of The New York Times 1417 01:10:53,916 --> 01:10:56,518 in October 2017. 1418 01:10:56,619 --> 01:11:00,589 The New York Times breaks this story about DOS, 1419 01:11:00,689 --> 01:11:03,826 and that Sarah Edmondson is interviewed talking about DOS 1420 01:11:03,926 --> 01:11:05,995 and everything involved. 1421 01:11:06,095 --> 01:11:09,231 [Armando] And the big bombshell is on the front page. 1422 01:11:09,331 --> 01:11:11,467 You have Sarah Edmondson's branding 1423 01:11:11,567 --> 01:11:13,569 for the world to see. 1424 01:11:13,669 --> 01:11:16,372 This isn't just a group of weirdos 1425 01:11:16,472 --> 01:11:18,407 trying to change their lives. 1426 01:11:18,507 --> 01:11:22,978 This is something really dark and messed up. 1427 01:11:23,078 --> 01:11:26,548 [Tabitha] When Sarah Edmondson happened, I was shattered. 1428 01:11:26,649 --> 01:11:30,252 I could not, um, maintain a sense of reality. 1429 01:11:30,352 --> 01:11:32,421 I had to go on medical leave from my job. 1430 01:11:32,521 --> 01:11:34,757 I had to be on, like, four different medications 1431 01:11:34,857 --> 01:11:38,794 to try to, like, maintain my sense of self again. 1432 01:11:38,894 --> 01:11:40,229 I had been duped. 1433 01:11:40,329 --> 01:11:41,764 I left. I couldn't-- 1434 01:11:41,864 --> 01:11:43,866 I just couldn't spend one more minute in there. 1435 01:11:43,966 --> 01:11:46,468 I decided to leave because I realized... 1436 01:11:46,568 --> 01:11:48,304 that I was in a cult. 1437 01:11:48,404 --> 01:11:50,472 Like, I realized this is for real. 1438 01:11:50,572 --> 01:11:53,409 I can't justify this anymore, no matter what anyone says, 1439 01:11:53,509 --> 01:11:55,878 the stories that they're trying to cover up. 1440 01:11:55,978 --> 01:11:57,746 My sanity was at stake. 1441 01:11:57,846 --> 01:12:02,284 I don't really have the choice to stay anymore. 1442 01:12:02,384 --> 01:12:04,053 Like, I can't justify this anymore. 1443 01:12:04,153 --> 01:12:06,555 And I still had friends that were still members, 1444 01:12:06,655 --> 01:12:09,024 they were still in, and still are. 1445 01:12:09,124 --> 01:12:10,326 [Dr. Marie] I was gobsmacked. 1446 01:12:10,426 --> 01:12:12,528 I thought, whoa, 1447 01:12:12,628 --> 01:12:18,033 Keith Raniere is really an evil mastermind. 1448 01:12:18,133 --> 01:12:19,702 When I learned Keith had had 1449 01:12:19,802 --> 01:12:23,172 sexual experiences with children, 1450 01:12:23,272 --> 01:12:26,842 that was the final straw. 1451 01:12:26,942 --> 01:12:28,077 That was it. 1452 01:12:29,578 --> 01:12:32,448 [Narrator] But that's not the end of the fallout. 1453 01:12:32,548 --> 01:12:35,050 One month after the story's publication, 1454 01:12:35,150 --> 01:12:38,854 the Dalai Lama relieves his personal emissary of his duties, 1455 01:12:38,954 --> 01:12:42,725 due in part for connecting His Holiness with NXIVM. 1456 01:12:44,159 --> 01:12:48,831 That November, Raniere flees his New York home. 1457 01:12:48,931 --> 01:12:51,400 Months later, a core group of followers, 1458 01:12:51,500 --> 01:12:53,669 including Nancy Salzman's daughter, Lauren, 1459 01:12:53,769 --> 01:12:57,473 and Allison Mack, disappear as well. 1460 01:12:57,573 --> 01:13:00,409 No one knows where they've gone.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Although hospitals have become more humane (particularly for children—though from the above study not nearly enough), there is still inadequate attention to preventing undue fear in people who must undergo painful procedures or general anesthesia. Indeed, some of those ill-fated individuals partially “awaken” during anesthesia and many develop some of the most horrific and complex PTSD symptoms.46 In the words of one survivor (a surgical nurse herself), “I feel a cosmic hollowness, as if my soul has left my body and can’t return … horrifying nightmares are my companion … often shocking me wide awake. When my eyes pop open, there is still no respite because the walls and ceiling turn blood red.”47 This riveting description illustrates the horror of enduring the combination of terror, extreme pain, and being unable to move or to communicate one’s situation. Biologically, the orthopedic patients, soldiers, rape victims and hospitalized children are reacting like wild animals fighting for their life after being frightened and captured. Their impulse to attack in an “aggravated rage” or to flee in frantic desperation is not only biologically appropriate; in fact, it is a frequent biological outcome. As a captured and terrified animal comes out of immobility, its survival may depend on its violent aggression toward the still-present predator. In humans, such violence, however, has produced tragic consequences to the individual and society. I had the opportunity to speak with the mother of Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber,” whose vendetta was waged against the impersonality of technology) and with the father of Jeffrey Dahmer (a serial killer who dismembered his victims). They both told me horrific stories of how their young children were “broken” by terrifying hospital experiences. Both parents described how, after terrifying hospitalizations, each of these children retreated into his own world. While such experiences of rage leading to perverted violence are (fortunately) rare, the terror and anger evoked by medical procedures is (unfortunately) not. Rage Turned Against the SelfWith humans, the impulse toward violent aggression may become terrifying in itself and is then turned against the self, as Kahlbaum so presciently observed in his seminal work on catatonia.48 This turning inward (or “retroflection”) results in further paralysis, suppression, passivity and resignation. The flipping between shutdown and outbursts of “impotent” and misdirected rage becomes the individual’s stereotypic reaction to later challenges that require much more nuanced and subtly differentiated feeling-based responses.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Proof So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely—within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex, with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand. My memory has something to say about the way trauma has altered my body’s DNA, like an ancient virus. I think a lot about what evidence, had it been measured or recorded or kept, would help make my case. Not in a court of law, exactly, because there are many things that happen to us that are beyond the purview of even a perfectly executed legal system. But the court of other people, the court of the body, the court of queer history. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity , José Esteban Muñoz writes, “The key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.” That ephemera: The recorded sound waves of her speech on one axis and a precise measurement of the flood of adrenaline and cortisol in my body on the other. Witness statements from the strangers who anxiously looked at us sideways in public places. A photograph of her grip on my arm in Florida, with measurements of the shadows to indicate depth of indentation; an equation to represent the likely pressure. A wire looped through my hair, ready to record her hiss. The rancid smell of anger. The metal tang of fear in the back of my throat. None of these things exist. You have no reason to believe me. “Ephemeral evidence is rarely obvious,” Muñoz says, “because it is needed to stand against the harsh lights of mainstream visibility and the potential tyranny of the fact.” What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I’m sitting in the center of a giant bed in a giant house on Key Nightmare. “I’m freaking out,” I tell her. “I’m ready to jump off a balcony into the sand or something.” She considers this for a long moment and then says, quietly, “Uh-oh, this is a marriage problem, right?” As far as she’s concerned, her own marriage is as solid as a house, but the truth is, it’s just about this time that her husband is beginning to notice what beautiful eyes his receptionist has, how the sound of her typing is like water rushing over a falls. For about five minutes I can’t talk, but instead nod or shake my head when she asks me questions. Her voice has taken on a soothing, reassuring tone I’ve never heard her use before. It makes me feel like crying. The bedroom is starting to really bother me so I close my eyes and grope my way out, still holding the phone to my ear. “I’m walking,” is what I finally say to her. “Good ,” she responds quickly. “If you’re walking, then you’re okay.” This is encouraging, so I walk some more. I walk out onto the balcony and stare at the phony boats on the horizon. I try to tell her what is happening to me — that my heart is beating so hard my T-shirt is moving, that I threw up because of some plane crash footage I saw two years ago, that I keep remembering being stalked by a cartoon guy with a whiplike mustache and a string tie. “Well, I hate to break it to you,” she says firmly, “but that sounds like Eric .” Eric is pretty thin and so is his mustache. “Well, Eric’s certainly not stalking me,” I tell her. I start to cry suddenly, which is a relief. “He’s doing whatever the opposite of stalking me is.” Now that I’m crying I can’t stop. I’m leaning over the balcony railing and tears are dropping into the sand below me. I tell Elizabeth this. “Why don’t you just please get off that balcony, and go back in the house?” “I’m not going to jump ,” I say. “It’s only about ten feet from the ground , for Chris’sakes.” “Oh,” she says. The problem is, whenever it occurs to me that he’s leaving me, I start to feel like throwing up again. Also, I haven’t slept for a couple of days. Or eaten. And it feels like there’s an alien in my chest. “You can’t not eat,” she says. “That’s what we’ll fix first.” She sounds so confident that I feel myself relax a little. I’m still trapped in the elevator but I’ve lost that terrible zooming-upward vertigo feeling. I look at my feet. Under her direction, I walk downstairs with the telephone and stand in the kitchen. “Tell me everything there is to eat,” she says.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Time Travel One of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn? There is a theory about time travel called the Novikov self-consistency principle, wherein Novikov asserts that if time travel were possible, it would still be impossible to travel back in time and alter events that have already taken place. If present-day you could return to the past, you could certainly make observations that felt new —observations that had the benefit of real-time hindsight—but you’d be unable to, say, prevent your parents from meeting, since that, by definition, had already happened. To do so, Novikov says, would be as impossible as jumping through a brick wall. Time—the plot of it—is fixed. No, Novikov’s time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Their dysfunctional relationship keeps rolling up mass—living arrangements, friends, pets, consumer purchases, property—until they’re ripping rainbows out of the ground. We saw something similar happening with Sarah Olstyn Martinez, before she was able to see her quitting decision for the expected-value problem that it actually was. As she put more time into her career, it became harder to quit. She had already put fifteen years in before she started thinking about changing careers. By the time she contacted me, another year had elapsed, creating even more friction against quitting. This is one of the reasons that retail traders hold on to losing positions. Imagine you’re in that situation: Once you’re losing in a position, you cancel your stop-loss order because you want to recover your losses. That often causes you to accumulate even more losses, making you even less likely to give up on the position. I could see the escalating commitment happening in front of my own eyes at the poker table. Players would lose, and they would start to bet more to try to recover the losses that they had previously accumulated, which then would make them bet even more still. That decision would generate more losses, which made them bet more still, and sometimes even move up in stakes. They would become entrapped. And that is why Stewart Butterfield and Alex Honnold are so exceptional. Both were able to cut their losses despite the tremendous resources they had already poured into achieving their goal. Butterfield had devoted four years and spent more than $10 million of his investors’ money when he quit working on Glitch . Honnold had been training for months to summit El Capitan, yet even with a friend’s film crew hanging off the mountain documenting his preparation and the completion of the film hinging on his attempt, he was still able to quit short of the summit in 2016. How Big Does the Katamari Grow?In Barry Staw’s classic 1976 experiment, “Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action,” he set out to ask how much prior commitment to a course of action influences future decisions about whether to stick or quit. He discovered that the answer is a lot . Staw recruited groups of business school students who were tasked with individually deciding how a corporation should allocate certain R&D funds between two of its divisions. To help with the choice, the students were given ten years of historical financial performance about the company and the two divisions under consideration. The participants each had to make an all-or-nothing decision about which department should receive the $10 million in R&D funds, meaning they only had two options: allocate the entire $10 million to one division and give no funds to the other or vice versa. Given the data provided to the students, there were reasonable arguments for allocating the funds to either of the two divisions.