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 Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Lust says to us, “If you just had this, everything would be fine.” But it’s not true. We wouldn’t be okay, and we have closets full of clothes to prove this. We thought that shirt and those pants would change the way we feel about our bodies, about how others perceive us, about how comfortable we are in our own skin. And then we got them and nothing changed, except the size of our bills. Lust promises what it can’t deliver.14 Dark to Light To be free from lust, we have to move from being darkened in our understanding to being enlightened in our understanding. And to be enlightened, we have to ask lots of questions about the things we crave: What is this craving promising? Can it deliver? Is this lust about something else? What is the lie here? Where is the good in this person or thing? Where is the good that has been distorted? What good thing has God made here that has been hijacked? Have I been tempted like this before? Have I given in before? What was it like? Did it work? Was I more satisfied or more empty? What will the moment, the morning, or the week after be like? Is there a pattern here? Maybe the most powerful thing we can do is simply to pray, “God, give me eyes to see the lie here.” Perhaps you can relate to this progression and the lie and the ways we get hooked. Maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about because you’re in the middle of it right now. Something has got its tentacles wrapped around you, and you are having an impossible time getting free. Happens all the time. And so it feels like it’s you versus the craving. You against the addiction. Your brain and heart against your flesh. I often meet people who say, “My battle against . . .” and then they name something that has them in its grip. To be honest, if it’s us against the craving, we will often lose. It’s too hard. And what happens most of the time is we see ourselves fighting all alone against some temptation that is so strong it wins. Maybe we will win here or there, but those become the exceptions. And when we give in, it can start to feel pointless. Why resist today if tomorrow we won’t be able to? There’s Something Else Going on Here There’s a passage in the book of Ephesians where it’s written, “Those who have been stealing must steal no longer.”15 Which is quite straightforward—don’t steal. But the passage doesn’t end there. It continues: “but must work, doing something useful with their own hands.” But it doesn’t there. It ends with: “that they may have something to share with those in need.” On first read, the instructions seem as basic as it gets. But there is much going on here just below the surface.

• 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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In fact, the erotic imagination is fueled by a host of feelings that are far from proper: aggression, raw lust, infantile neediness, power, revenge, selfishness, and jealousy (to name only a few). These feelings, which are all permanent residents of our intimate relations, can threaten the stability of our connection and make love miserable. It is much easier, and often wiser, to banish them to the edge of our imagination, where they can do no harm. In the antechambers of the erotic mind, the rules of propriety are turned on their heads, often invited in for the sole purpose of being trampled. Forbidden frontiers are crossed, gender roles are reversed, modesty is corrupted, and imbalances of power are luxuriously played out, all for the sake of excitement. In fantasy we act out what we dare not do in reality. Joni and Ray Joni’s lament goes something like this: “Ray thinks I don’t like sex. But I do like sex, or at least I used to, I just don’t like it so much with him. He doesn’t get me sexually, and I can’t seem to let him in on it, either. It feels hopeless. I’m only twenty-nine. That’s too young to stop having sex.” “Is there a right age to stop having sex?” I ask her. “Later maybe we can pick a date. For now, I’d rather know what is it you want from Ray that you’re not getting.” “I want him to be more of a man, and I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud.” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t even know what it means. Like I want him to be some kind of 1950s Neanderthal. But I don’t want that. My mother had that. I don’t think my father ever asked her what she liked, in the bedroom or out of it. Ray is a mensch. He’s a real gentleman, he respects me, and he lets me be. I love how easy our relationship is, but it doesn’t do a thing for me sexually.” “What’s missing?” I inquire. Suddenly she leans over and grabs my wrist, not roughly, but with confidence. “This is what I want,” she says. Then, tentatively, gently, she brushes my forearm and adds, “This is what I get.” “So he’s passive?” “Not exactly. He initiates sex all the time, but the way he does it makes me crazy. He just sort of raises his eyebrows and goes, ‘Hmmm?’ It feels like he’s asking me, ‘Am I going to get laid tonight?’ like I’m supposed to take over from there.” “He has a way of approaching you that doesn’t say, ‘I want you,’ as much as ‘Do you want me?’ Is that it?” “Yes!” Joni shouts. I explain that if I’m going to understand what she wants from Ray, first I have to understand what it is she wants sex to provide. “If sex is a quest,” I ask her, “what is your Holy Grail?”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  When Carla and Leo came to see me, she was at her wit’s end. They’d been together seventeen years: the first six a frenzy of the flesh, the next four the chaos of babyhood, the last seven a sexual desert. She went from talking to pleading to screaming to compensating. She had a number of flings and then a serious affair. He found out, she threatened divorce, he suggested therapy, and here they are. She says, “I am so sick of the excuses. It’s his work, it’s the stress, it’s his dying father, he has to get up early, he hasn’t been to the gym and so he doesn’t have the energy, his back hurts, it’s my breath, it’s my weight, it’s his weight. I took it personally for so long, but now I’m done. I love this man, I’m prepared to stay, but I can’t live like this.” He says, “I always considered myself to be very competent sexually. We kid around that we broke furniture when we first started dating; there was a lot of passion. I never looked at the kids as a defining moment in my life sexually, but obviously something switched somewhere deep inside.” I learn that Leo had begun to withdraw physically when Carla became pregnant with their first son, and they had no sexual contact at all during the last trimester. Leo just came home later and later from work. Carla knew something was up, though they never discussed it openly. “What changed for you when she became a mother?” I ask. “Her significance,” he answers. “Her whole being turned from being my lover, my partner, and my wife to being the mother of my son. And then the mother of my other son. For a while they needed her completely, and that was really OK with me. I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world to have our babies sleeping next to us, for her to nurse them through the night. I wasn’t jealous at all. I’m a very loving, nurturing father myself.” “What’s it like to suck the breast of a woman who’s been nursing a baby?” I ask him. “It was weird,” he answered. “The whole physical thing was a little weird. I watched her give birth, twice, and I’ve got to say it was not so great for our sex life.” “I know it’s supposed to be this magical moment, the miracle of life and all that, but no one seems to want to acknowledge the yuck factor,” I reassure him. “It’s not politically correct for a man to admit that watching his wife give birth can be gross. There’s a character in one of Alice Walker’s books, I think it’s Mr. Hal, who watches his partner give birth and is never able to touch her—or any other woman—for the rest of his life. He says he never wants to put someone through that again.”

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Goertz, Lu, Nicholson, Shan, Smith. His name will come on first. She drones on, dead University of Iowa professors, lone gunman named Gang Lu. Gang Lu. Lone gunman. Before I have a chance to absorb that she says, The dead are. Chris’s picture. Oh no, oh God. I lean against Mary’s chair and then leave the room abruptly. I have to stand in the bathroom for a while and look at myself in the mirror. I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from wires. In the living room she’s pronouncing all the other names. The two critically wounded are the administrator and her assistant, Miya Sioson. The administrator is already dead for all practical purposes, although they won’t disconnect the machines until the following afternoon. The student receptionist will survive but will never again be able to move more than her head. She was in Gang Lu’s path and he shot her in the mouth and the bullet lodged in the top of her spine and not only will she never dance again, she’ll never walk or write or spend a day alone. She got to keep her head but lost her body. The final victim is Chris’s mother, who will weather it all with a dignified face and an erect spine, then return to Germany and kill herself without further words or fanfare. I tell the white face in the mirror that Gang Lu did this, wrecked everything and killed all those people. It seems as ludicrous as everything else. I can’t get my mind to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s facts; today hasn’t jelled yet. “It’s a good thing none of this happened,” I say to my face. A knock on the door and I open it. The collie is swaying on her feet, toenails clenched to keep from sliding on the wood floor. Julene’s hesitant face. “She wanted to come visit you,” she tells me. I bring her in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to my face and I take her muzzle and we move through the gears slowly, first second third fourth, all the way through town, until what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting to come in, from those who just saw the faces on the news. Shirley screens. A knock comes on the door. Julene settles the dog down again on her blanket. It’s the husband at the door, looking frantic. He hugs me hard but I’m made of cement, arms stuck in a down position. The women immediately clear out, taking their leave, looking at the floor. Suddenly it’s only me and him, sitting in our living room on a Friday night, just like always.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I can’t do it . My girl cousins disappear and in their place is Bernice, who points to the corner. I shake my head. She takes the manual, grasp-and-steer approach. This is not a good idea , my mother whispers. I’m in the corner all alone and I can’t feel Hal’s arm in my back. Wherever I am, that’s where Hal’s supposed to be. I turn around and around, but the corner is completely empty. All that’s in it is me. Under the sofa: quite a bit of dirt, several jacks, a book called The Wait for Me Kitten , a ballpoint pen, and the crust off a peanut butter sandwich. No Hal. To look behind the refrigerator you have to put your cheek against the kitchen wall. All that’s back there is dirt. The broom closet doesn’t even have a broom in it, just the vacuum cleaner. Under Linda’s bed are about ten sandwich crusts, a clear plastic coin purse with an empty lipstick tube inside, the usual dirt, and a strange piece of red felt that looks like the tongue of a stuffed animal. The bedroom closets yield nothing but shoes. Hal wouldn’t be able to go out to the sandbox by himself because he can’t walk. Nevertheless, I open the back screen door and call to him. Nothing from Hal, but in the kitchen my mother drops what she’s doing and moves directly to the telephone. She dials with a pencil, puts a cigarette in her mouth, fishes around in her pocket for a lighter, finds it, snaps it open, lights the cigarette, and says into the receiver Let me talk to your mom. The kitchen counter can be gotten to by way of a red step stool; you can climb up there while your mother is in the other room and eat chocolate chips out of the cupboard. You can also stand in the sink and look at the whole backyard through the window. She stops me before I make it up to the counter. She’s carrying the phone, the receiver pinned to her shoulder. The other arm picks me off the stool and sets me on the floor. I point to the cupboards. “He’s not up there,” she says shortly. She knows something. Back in the living room I watch her as she finishes the call and hangs up. She leans back in her chair, lights another cigarette, and blows large ragged smoke rings up to the ceiling. Even when I lie down on the floor right at her feet she won’t look at me. From upside down she doesn’t resemble herself; she could be a lady from anywhere. I gently kick the rungs of her chair, once, twice. Her eyes flicker downward for an instant, and then back up. She checks her watch, and then a second later checks it again. Any minute now our menfolk should be coming home. [image "art" file=Image00001.jpg] From the kitchen come the sounds of sizzling and whispering.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  In the book of Jubilees, the corruption of creation is due to the fal , which has repercussions for the natural world.13 One of the effects is that the normal human lifespan is shortened ( Jub. 4:30; 23:12). Most frequently, sin brings to the world corruption, disease, death, decay, suffering, and sorrow. The story of the fall of the flood in Jubilees expresses the idea that it is the fall in the superhuman or semi-divine realm that most readily explains the presence of evil in the world. Wintermute suggests that “the author of Jubilees teaches us three things about evil: (1) It is superhuman; 12 The Book of Jubilees may also be understood in the context of Jewish/Judean self-definition in and around the Maccabean Crisis. One might find it also helpful to read Jubilees in concert with later works such as 2 Bar. and 4 Ezra regarding the fall and Torah. 13 See later for more precision. 63 New Creation Motif 63 (2) but it is not caused by God; (3) therefore it comes from the angelic world, which has suffered a breach from God’s good order.” 14 Sin also brings about major disruptions in the orderly operation of the natural world. Animals’ original nature change and so they began to rebel against humans and lose the ability to speak. Jubilees 3:28 reads: “On that day the mouth of all the beasts and cattle and birds and whatever walked or moved was stopped from speaking because all of them used to speak with one another with one speech and one language (τὰ θηρία καὶ τὰ τετράποδα καὶ τὰ ἑρπετὰ … ὁμόφωνα εἶναι πρὸ τῆς παραβάσεως τοῖς πρωτοπλάστοις· διότι … ὁ ὄφις ἀνθρωπίνῃ φωνῇ ἐλάλησε τῇ Εὔᾳ).” 15 The earth itself was corrupted by the fall as a result of increasing sin. Jubilees further reads: “Behold, the land itself will be corrupted on account of all their deeds, and there will be no seed of the vine, and there will be no oil because their works are entirely faithless” ( Jub. 23:18). Cosmic irregularities occur during times of extensive sin, such as during the pre-flood era and in the last days. These cosmic changes include earthquakes, widespread crop failure, plagues, birth defects, and disturbances among animals. Some of these changes in the natural world are based on Gen. 3:16-19, which discusses the pain of women in childbearing. The curse on the ground requires hard labor to grow crops ( Jub. 3:25; 4:28) and death is the certain human fate ( Jub. 4:3). Jubilees 23:13–14 describes the increasing futility of life due to the deterioration of the world from human sin:

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  It is particularly germane to how traumatized individuals can begin to free themselves from the many behavioral reenactments and repetitive feelings of fear, numbness, rage, terror, helplessness and despair. The disparate roles of sensation, feeling and cognition in therapy have followed a convoluted and confounding path. At times emotions have been neglected, while cognition was esteemed. At other times, cognition has been dismissed, while emotions were practically worshiped. And most of the time, with very few exceptions, the therapeutic role of sensations has remained unknown. The balanced attention to sensation, feeling, cognition and élan vital (life-energy) remains the emergent therapeutic future for transforming the whole person. Freud, following his gifted teacher Charcot, initially believed that to cure neurosis, the patient must “relive” the painful (traumatic) memories that she had “repressed.” In addition, this reliving had to include a strong emotional component, a dramatic catharsis associated with the precipitating event. Employing this method, Freud came to believe that the precipitating event was frequently childhood molestation, usually perpetrated by the father on his daughter. (The vast majority of Freud’s patients were so-called hysterical women). Needless to say, Freud’s theory was not well received by the professional community, many of them doctors, bankers and lawyers. Most of them were fathers as well. From what is now known about the prevalence of sexual abuse, some of them almost certainly had been guilty of incest themselves. For this and other reasons, Freud backed away both from the seduction theory (as it was ironically labeled) as well as from his therapeutic method of uncovering repressed memories in order to relive them through strong emotional catharsis. In what must have been a profound betrayal to many of his patients, Freud began to interpret their symptoms not as deriving from sexual violation, but as being rooted instead in their childhood “oedipal” wishes, fantasies to have sex with the parent of the opposite gender. Freud may have also been unnerved when, during the intense cathartic reliving, patients would frequently transfer those (alleged) oedipal lusts onto him. Freud, with a discomfort in his own sexuality, appears to have shrunk from staying present with his patients’ confused, volatile sexuality and, thusly, betrayed them in yet another way. For these and other reasons, it appears that Freud abandoned the “hypno-abreactive” techniques in favor of free association to “help” the patient become conscious of their oedipal wishes and then to (somehow) sublimate these infantile “lusts.” In this way, Freud believed that by recognizing their fantasies, his patients’ neuroses could be transformed to “ordinary suffering.” A contemporary (Pierre Janet 140 ) and a student (Wilhelm Reich) of Freud saw things differently.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As an orphan from birth and a survivor of the most unimaginable atrocities and human suffering, Adam had risen above this torment. He immigrated to South America at the age of nineteen, hoping “to escape his past.” There he settled and built his business, becoming a powerful, financially successful, international entrepreneur. Yet, when this extraordinary human being was referred to me, he had been reduced to a broken man. He was stooped over and shuffled as he entered the room. His posture and movements reminded me of patients I have seen in the back wards of psychiatric hospitals. His eyes looked blankly at the floor, and he seemed not to notice that I was even present. I had no idea where to begin. On the one hand, he was so shut down that it seemed like nothing I could say or do would reach him; but on the other hand, I feared that if I were able to bring up feelings, they might overwhelm him so completely that he would collapse into a bottomless catatonic despair. How could I reach this man without destroying him? I felt lost and intimidated by the scope and delicate challenge of my task. By rote, Adam went on and on with the litany he had told the psychiatrist. There was not a trace of feeling in his narrative: “That all happened so long ago,” he added with a small tired sigh. I listened, finding myself quite uncomfortable at hearing such horror described without affect. In a strange way, though, I was relieved that he had no feeling; that way I wouldn’t have to feel either. Intellectually, I distanced myself from feeling and from Adam. I was able to do this by falling back on a clinical analysis, wondering what mechanism he had used to wall himself off from his horrific experiences and how he had kept himself from winding up wandering in the streets, like he had done as an orphan, or in the back ward of some mental institution. As a way to try to initiate a little contact, I questioned Adam about his work, his family and friends—any topic where I thought there might be an entry point to even a tiny trace of positive feeling. Nothing came of this. I found myself, strangely, asking him to describe the last few hours of his day. Puzzled, he told me of missing his flight and frantically renting a car to drive the two hundred miles from Curitiba to São Paulo to meet with me. At the rental lot near the airport he recalled seeing children flying kites that they had made from things found at the garbage dump.h

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as the Apocalypse According to some students of eschatology, 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world. And it was, in a way. But the end did not come as fire or flood. No glittering comet struck our planet. No virus leapt from continent to continent until bodies lay strewn in the streets. The flora of the world did not grow to overtake our buildings. We did not run out of oxygen. We did not vanish or burst into dust. We did not all wake up with blood soaked into our pillows. We did not watch a beam from an alien ship carving trenches into the earth’s crust. We did not turn into animals. We did not starve or use up all of our potable water. We did not trigger a new ice age and freeze to death. We did not choke to death in a self-induced smog. We didn’t get sucked through a wormhole. The sun did not overtake us. At the end of the world, the park was beautiful, hot. The grass was a little long. The trees were punctuated with birds. Dream House as Surprise Ending “I’m in love with someone else,” she says. The two of you are sitting in an Iowa City park next to a baseball diamond after a friend’s baby shower, and you don’t understand how the conversation even arrived at this point. The grass is crowded with dandelions, and you remember, suddenly, that game you played as a kid, yellow-chinned, in love. “What?” you say. “With Amber,” she says. You think of Amber—a classmate of hers at Indiana, willow-thin and redheaded, with a soft, mousy voice. “We kissed once, drunkenly, and I realized that I loved her.” You stare at her, fast-forwarding through a mental film of every time she’d accused you of merely looking at other people the wrong way. She meets your gaze for a moment and then looks away. She slings her arm over the back of the bench, like she’s going to bring you in close. She doesn’t. You get in your car, drive to a distant street, and pull over. You don’t have the space in your brain to cry. You pick up your phone and see that, on Freecycle, someone is giving away catalog cards from a defunct library. You drive to a local Panera, take a stack of cards from a very nice woman who is probably wondering why you look like you’ve been forced to eat dog shit at gunpoint. Back at your house you calmly add the pile of cards to your scrap collection because you think you’d like to make a collage. Very late, your girlfriend—or is she?—appears at your house and says she has to get back to Bloomington. Where has she been this whole time? She doesn’t say, but she kisses you. “I think we’re meant to get through this,” she says. “Don’t worry. Promise me you won’t worry.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The Lure of False Purposes The gravitational pull we feel toward finding a purpose comes from two elements in human nature. First, unable to rely on instincts as other animals do, we require some means of having a sense of direction, a way to guide and restrict our behavior. Second, we humans are aware of our puniness as individuals in a world with billions of others in a vast universe. We are aware of our mortality, and how we will eventually be swallowed up in the eternity of time. We need to feel larger than just the individuals we are, and connected to something that transcends us. Human nature being what it is, however, many people seek to create purpose and a feeling of transcendence on the cheap, to find it in the easiest and most accessible way, with the least amount of effort. Such people give themselves over to false purposes , those that merely supply the illusion of purpose and transcendence. We can contrast them with real purposes in the following way: The real purpose comes from within. It is an idea, a calling, a sense of mission that we feel personally and intimately connected to. It is our own; we may have been inspired by others, but nobody imposed it upon us and nobody can take it away. If we are religious, we don’t merely accept the orthodoxy; we go through rigorous introspection and make our belief inward, true to ourselves. False purposes come from external sources—belief systems that we swallow whole, conformity to what other people are doing. The real purpose leads us upward, to a more human level. We improve our skills and sharpen our minds; we realize our potential and contribute to society. False purposes lead downward, to the animal side of our nature—to addictions, loss of mental powers, mindless conformity, and cynicism. It is critical that we become aware of these false forms of purpose. Inevitably all of us at some point in our lives fall for them because they are so easy, popular, and cheap. If we can eliminate the impulse toward these lower forms, we will naturally gravitate toward the higher, in our unavoidable search for meaning and purpose. Here are five of the most common forms of false purposes that have appealed to humans since the beginning of civilization. The pursuit of pleasure: For many of us, work is just an irritating necessity of life. What really motivates us is avoiding pain, and finding as much pleasure as possible in our time outside work. The pleasures we pursue can take various forms—sex, stimulants, entertainment, eating, shopping, gambling, technological fads, games of all sorts. No matter the objects of the pursuit, they tend to lead to a dynamic of diminishing returns. The moments of pleasure we get tend to get duller through repetition.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Later, you will you learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. The setting does its work. This world might as well have been an island, surrounded by impassable waters. On one side, a golf course—owned by the university, as was the house—where drunk undergrads would stagger like zombies, silhouetted on the hill. On another, a stand of trees that suggested a forest, mysterious and laced with wildlife and darkness. Nearby, houses occupied by strangers who either never heard or didn’t want to get involved. Last, a road, but the sort of road that led to another road, a larger one. Unfriendly to pedestrians. Not meant to be traversed, really. Miles from the town’s center. The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (none of this can really be happening), a prison (need to get out need to get out), and, finally, a dungeon of memory. In dreams it sits behind a green door, for reasons you have never understood. The door was not green. Dream House as Set DesignThe scene opens on a nondescript house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, a few years after the close of the aughts. It’s a suburb, but one fringed with wildness; animals move over the property as though no one occupies it at all. A front door faces the street, but this door will remain closed. The driveway leisurely loops up the left side of the property like a creek, a mailbox at its mouth. The shingles are off-white; a red chimney is the only hint of character. Behind the house is a large tree with a wooden swing dangling from a low branch. It is opposite the only door the residents will ever enter: a back door that leads into the kitchen.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  While we linger, rubbing our hands and whispering to each other, the grandson who is minding us watches the wall and chews gum. At this moment we don’t know that downstairs he is working magic, that he will present to us a woman who looks rested. That’s how I will get to see her last, in her pale gray wool suit and pink blouse, her glasses resting on her nose as though she’s just dropped off for a minute; her cheeks will be okay again. The clothes will fit perfectly, as though she hadn’t lost a pound. Before the crowd arrives, when it’s just me and my sister and an aunt, he will reach in his pocket and bring forth the bottle of pins, half gone. Her hands are the only wrong thing. They look strange to me and I can’t figure out why until Linda picks up my hand and shows me: Her wedding ring is on my finger; I forgot she gave it to me. The hands begin to look more normal to me now, and the silence of the room gives way to the breathing of the sisters, the coldness of the kissed hands, and the empty air that says You girls, you girls . Out There [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] I t isn’t even eight A.M. and I’m hot . My rear end is welded to the seat just like it was yesterday. I’m fifty miles from the motel and about a thousand and a half from home, in a little white Mazda with 140,000 miles on it and no rust. I’m all alone in Alabama, with only a cooler and a tape deck for company. It’s already in the high 80s. Yesterday, coming up from the keys through Florida, I had a day-long anxiety attack that I decided last night was really heat prostration. I was a cinder with a brain; I was actually whimpering. I kept thinking I saw alligators at the edge of the highway. There were about four hundred exploded armadillos, too, but I got used to them. They were real, and real dead. The alligators weren’t real or dead, but they may have been after me. I’m running away from running away from home. I bolted four weeks ago, leaving my husband to tend the dogs and tool around town on his bicycle. He doesn’t love me anymore, it’s both trite and true. He does love himself, though. He’s begun wearing cologne and staring into the mirror for long minutes, trying out smiles. He’s become a politician. After thirteen years he came to realize that the more successful he got, the less he loved me. That’s how he put it, late one night. He won that screaming match. He said, gently and sadly, “I feel sort of embarrassed of you.” I said, “Of what? The way I look? The way I act?” And he said, softly, “Everything, sort of.” And it was true. Well, I decided to take a trip to Florida.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  119 jaded from too much pleasure at an early age. When Onegin inherits a country estate, he moves there, where—for lack of better company—he makes friends with a Romantic poet, Lensky, who is in love with a neighboring family’s daughter, a girl named Olga. When Onegin meets Olga, he also meets her older, bookish sister, Tatyana, who falls immediately in love with Onegin and—having read a lot of sentimental novels—sends him a letter the next day offering herself to him as his wife. After a time Onegin tells Tatyana that he cannot love her and warns her to be more careful with her affections in the future. A disagreement between Onegin and Lensky precipitates a duel in which Onegin kills Lensky; after a time, Onegin returns to St. Petersburg. At a party, he sees an amazingly beautiful woman enter the room. It is Tatyana, with whom it is now Onegin’s turn to fall hopelessly in love. After Onegin pursues her for months, she confronts him but upbraids him for wanting her for the wrong reasons. Tatyana is now married and although she confesses that she still loves Onegin, she will remain faithful to her husband. Onegin, stricken, is still standing where Tatyana left him when her husband enters the room, and the poem ends. In one way, this is a kind of comeuppance for a Byronic hero, who gets a taste of his own medicine. Pushkin’s debt to Byron includes verse form and tone as well as a sketch of the protagonist. Byron, despite his Romanticism, admired the wit and formal brilliance of 18 th-century poetry. In Don Juan, he used a complicated verse form called ottava rima. Ottava rima rhymes abababcc, a dif ¿ cult form in English, which is a rhyme-poor language. Byron plays with the dif¿ culty by setting up some perfectly outrageous rhymes (e.g., “river” with “Guadalquivir”). Eugene Onegin resembles Don Juan in many ways. It was written over a period of some years and published a canto or two at a time. Its narrator is, like Byron, the central character of the poem—a witty, charming, urbane companion with whom we enjoy spending time. The reader’s primary relationship in Eugene Onegin is with the narrator, not the characters, as in Byron’s Don Juan and also Fielding’s Tom Jones.On the other hand, in contrast to Byron in Don Juan , Pushkin calls his installments in Eugene Onegin “Chapters” instead of “Cantos,” since he called this “A Novel in Verse,” suggesting that despite his reservations about Romanticism

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  George was arrested and charged with capital murder. While in the Russell County jail, he became acutely psychotic. Officers reported that he wouldn’t leave his cell. He was observed eating his own feces. His mother visited him, but he didn’t recognize her. He couldn’t speak in complete sentences. The two lawyers who were appointed to represent him at his capital trial were primarily concerned that only one of them would be paid the $1,000 for out-of-court time that Alabama provided lawyers appointed in capital cases. They began squabbling with each other, and one filed a civil suit against the other about who could claim the money. Meanwhile, the judge sent George to Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa for a competency examination. Ed Seger, the doctor who examined George, mysteriously concluded that he was not mentally ill but was “malingering” or faking symptoms of mental illness. Based on that evaluation, the judge allowed the capital murder trial to proceed. George’s lawyers bickered with one another, presented no defense, and called no witnesses. The State called Dr. Seger, who persuaded the jury that there was nothing mentally wrong with George, even as he continuously spit in a cup and made loud clucking noises throughout the trial. George’s family members were distraught. George had been working at a Pier 1 furniture store in Houston before his car accident. He left town without picking up his check, which had been ready for collection for over two days before his departure. His mother, a poor woman who knew the value of a dollar to someone like George, found this behavior more demonstrative of mental illness than anything else she could point to, and she authorized the lawyers to obtain the unclaimed check in the hope that they could present it at the trial to confirm George’s confused mental state. The lawyers, who were still bickering over the money, cashed the check to pay themselves instead of using it as evidence. George was convicted and given the death penalty. By the time we at EJI got involved, he had been on death row for several years, moving inexorably toward execution. When I met him, prison doctors were heavily medicating him with psychotropic drugs, which at least stabilized his behavior. It was so abundantly clear that George was mentally ill that it came as no shock when we discovered that the doctor who had examined him at Bryce Hospital was a fraud with no medical training. “Dr. Ed Seger” had made up his credentials. He had never graduated from college but had fooled hospital officials into believing he was a trained physician with expertise in psychiatry. He had masqueraded at the hospital for eight years conducting competency evaluations on people accused of crimes before his fraud was uncovered.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  It was a charm against something, I thought, though maybe that was giving it too much meaning, maybe it was less than a charm, like a stone one turns in one’s hand, not for any purpose but for the feel of it. Then he stopped his chant and said my name, or not my name but that syllable he used to approximate it, since my name was unpronounceable in his language; he had tried to say it at first but each time stumbled over sounds he couldn’t make, the intricate shapes that made him shake his head in bemusement. I had felt this myself with R.; the English version of his name is common enough, but it sounded strange in Portuguese, and though I practiced pronouncing it endlessly and though I’m good at learning languages, each time I said his name R. would laugh, and so I stopped using it, I used other names instead, private names I had invented and so could never mispronounce. The syllable Mitko used was a private name too, it was his alone, and he said it now as if to bring me into focus, saying it a second time and a third, and then, Shte umra , he said, I’m going to die, they say I’m going to die, and at his own words the tears that had welled up spilled over, streaming down his cheeks. He let go of me to wipe them away, using the palms of both hands, and then he held his hands over his eyes, rocking his whole body back and forth now that his hands were still. Mitko, I said, reaching over to place my hand on his back, unsure what to do with it now that it was free, Mitko, what do you mean, who says this, and he answered, still rocking, Lekarite , the doctors, they say my kidneys and my liver don’t work, they say I will only live a year. Mitko, I said again, Mitko, and maybe the single syllable oh, I’m not sure what I intended it to mean. But how, I found myself saying, from what, thinking that it couldn’t be the syphilis, which should have taken years to do its work, even if he hadn’t taken the drugs I gave him money for, gave him money for twice over; but he shook his head at this sharply when I asked him, Ne , he said, ne , and then he said nothing else.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Chronic immobility gives rise to the core emotional symptoms of trauma: numbness, shutdown, entrapment, helplessness, depression, fear, terror, rage and hopelessness. The person remains fearful, unable to imagine safety from a never-ending (internal) enemy and unable to reengage in life. Survivors of severe and protracted (chronic) trauma describe their lives as those of “the living dead.” Murray has poignantly written about this state: “here it is as if the person’s primal springs of vitality had dried up, as if he were empty to the core of his being.”51 In the poignant 1965 film The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, an emotionally deadened Jewish Holocaust survivor who, despite his prejudice, develops a fatherly affection for a young black teenager who works for him. When, in the final scene, the boy is killed, Sol impales his own hand on the spike of a memo spindle so that he can feel something, anything. Trauma and Immobility: A Way OutIn review: Trauma arises when one’s human immobility responses do not resolve; that is, when one cannot make the transition back to normal life, and the immobility reaction becomes chronically coupled with fear and other intense negative emotions such as dread, revulsion and helplessness. After this coupling has been established, the physical sensations of immobility by themselves evoke fear. A traumatized individual has become conditioned to be fearful of his or her internal (physical) sensations that now generate the fear that extends and deepens (potentiates) the paralysis. Fear begets paralysis, and fear of the sensations of paralysis begets more fear, promoting yet a deeper paralysis. In this way, a normally time-limited adaptive reaction becomes chronic and maladaptive. The feedback loop closes in on itself. In this downward spiral, the vortex of trauma is born. Successful trauma therapy helps people resolve trauma symptoms. The feedback loop is broken by uncoupling fear from immobility (see Figures 4.1a and 4.1b). Effective therapy breaks, or depotentiates, this trauma-fear feedback loop by helping a person safely learn to “contain” his or her powerful sensations, emotions and impulses without becoming overwhelmed. Thus, the immobility response is enabled to resolve as it is evolved to do.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Traumhaus as Lipogram It’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.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Half Credit When I was a child, my father told me that if I ever was struggling to answer a question on a test, I should, instead, write down everything I knew about the topic. I took this advice seriously. Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say. I waxed poetic on those scenes in a novel I could visualize clearly, instead of striving to evoke the ones I couldn’t. I recorded everything I knew about a particular lab experiment when I couldn’t correctly balance equations on my exam. When I couldn’t explain how particular historical moments shifted the tide of major world events, I wrote down the little stories I did remember. Let it never be said I didn’t try. Dream House as Exercise in Style It would make sense if, during the time in the Dream House, your work suffered. Why not? You were miserable; you spent what probably added up to weeks or months of your life crying and snotting and howling in agony. But instead, your creativity explodes. You are brimming with ideas, so many that you sign up for six workshops in your last semester of school. You begin to experiment with fragmentation. Maybe “experiment” is a generous word; you’re really just unable to focus enough to string together a proper plot. Every narrative you write is smashed into pieces and shoved into a constraint, an Oulipian’s wet dream—lists and television episode synopses and one with the scenes shattered and strung backward. You feel like you can jump from one idea to the next, searching for a kind of aggregate meaning. You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before. There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt. Back up, cross your eyes. Something is there. 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.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Cycle Cukor was known to torment his actresses to get “real” performances out of them. One biographer wrote that Cukor “seemed almost to revel in taking [Judy] Garland to the brink for scenes where she had to bare her emotions…. [He would remind her] of her own joyless childhood … and career low points, her marital failures … and chronic insecurity.” The makeup artist from A Star Is Born said, “He knew how to hurt a woman, and he used it several times to get them into a mood for a crying scene.” While shooting an iconic scene in which Garland’s character, actress Esther Blodgett, dissolves into hysterics in front of a studio head, “Cukor had Garland so worked up beforehand that she was sick, was physically throwing up,” the biographer wrote. “[But while] he might have been rough on Garland … it was for a purpose.” In that scene, Esther is in her dressing room between takes. She’s wearing an absurd straw boater, heavy eye makeup, a cherry-red cardigan that matches her lipstick. Overly large freckles are drawn on her cheeks. Around her the room is full of reflections: crystal, mirrors, chrome; pink-and-silver cellophane around a bouquet of white flowers. When Oliver Niles asks after her husband—an alcoholic on an intense downward spiral—the cheeriness falls from her face like a person slipping into sleep. She gets up and fusses around a bit before sitting again to talk. She shakes, stammers, gasps shallowly and sharply between words, tilts her head back to catch her tears. Her eyes dart around, never settling on any one place except, occasionally, somewhere behind the camera. She sobs with abandon. Her hand goes to her mouth, as if she has just realized something she does not want to admit. She rubs her hands roughly over her cheeks, wiping away her freckles. “No matter how much you love somebody,” she ends, her voice soaked in misery and resignation, “how do you live out the days?” The scene is unnerving, devastating, wildly effective. Were it not for my moral unease about the details of its creation, it would be difficult to argue with the results: a character who, like Gaslight ’s Paula, truly seems on the verge of an acute nervous breakdown (and, unlike Gaslight , with the actress not too far behind). Once they’d finished shooting and Cukor had gotten what he wanted, “gentleness and humor took over.” He touched her on the shoulder and said, “Judy, Marjorie Main couldn’t have done that any better.” As the scene draws to a close, Esther redraws her freckles, collects herself, and returns to the set. There, in front of so many people, she picks up right where she left off—arms flung open, and singing.