Disappointment

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.

Page 145 of 189 · 20 per page

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  Men will often watch how a woman eats and drinks to get a sense of how she will kiss and make love. The more robust a woman’s appetite, the more likely she’ll be open and passionate. What is sadder than those who say they’ve lost the passion are the confessions from those who say they’ve never had it. To be spending time in a romantic relationship without experiencing the ride of a passionate kiss is unconscionable. Kissing is the essence of romance out of which passion emerges, and in an ongoing relationship, you deserve sensuality. Whether you’re trying to create it or re-create it doesn’t matter. No one else is more entitled to passion, regardless of age or length of time in a relationship, than you are. The only prerequisite for passion is a desire to have it. The History of KissingKissing just may be the greatest form of communication ever invented. According to one legend, the kiss was created by medieval knights for the ridiculous purpose of determining whether their wives had been nipping at the mead barrel while they were off crusading. Fortunately, kissing did not remain limited to alcohol detection. In the past, some young women believed babies were the result of a passionate kiss. (They had the right idea, of course, but they just didn’t follow the thought to its biological conclusion.) Indeed, kissing not only survived, it has thrived, and for good reason. Secret from Lou’s Archives The word “kiss” comes from the 12th-century English word “cyssan,” which refers to “wet, soul, or tongue.” The more likely (and sweeter) explanation of the origin of the kiss extends back to the bond between mother and child when, before the invention of jars of baby food, mothers had to first chew food in order to give it to their child. The emotional connection that takes place here goes way beyond the giving and receiving of food. It’s about peace and safety and a sensation of being exactly where each other belongs. The reason a baby often falls asleep at her mothers breast long after she’s finished eating is that the feeling of lips on flesh is so comforting. Human lips not only contain sebaceous glands, they also are filled with extremely sensitive nerve endings. When these nerve endings come in contact with another person’s lips or skin, the connection creates a language of its own. We all want to be fluent in lip language in order to send clear messages or receive them in the spirit with which they are intended. A kiss can be kind, empathetic, sympathetic, sad, final, cute, polite, invitational, passionate, ravaging, or aloof. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a kiss is worth a billion. It can be used to deliver any kind of communication one desires, provided one is skilled in the art. And no kiss has ever been wasted—not even the kiss of death.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  So I wondered, why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are her goddess images only white, western european, judeo-christian? Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? Well, I thought, Mary has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope and to deal only with the ecology of western european women. Then I came to the first three chapters of your Second Passage, and it was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. I began to feel my history and my mythic background distorted by the absence of any images of my foremothers in power. Your inclusion of African genital mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any consideration of female ecology, and too little has been written about it. To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other. To dismiss our Black foremothers may well be to dismiss where european women learned to love. As an African-american woman in white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted and trivialized, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own. When I speak of knowledge, as you know, I am speaking of that dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this depth within each of us that nurtures vision. What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of all other noneuropean women, and denied the real connections that exist between all of us. It is obvious that you have done a tremendous amount of work for this book. But simply because so little material on non-white female power and symbol exists in white women’s words from a radical feminist perspective, to exclude this aspect of connection from even comment in your work is to deny the fountain of noneuropean female strength and power that nurtures each of our visions. It is to make a point by choice. Then, to realize that the only quotations from Black women’s words were the ones you used to introduce your chapter on African genital mutilation made me question why you needed to use them at all. For my part, I felt that you had in fact misused my words, utilized them only to testify against myself as a woman of Color. For my words which you used were no more, nor less, illustrative of this chapter than “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” or any number of my other poems might have been of many other parts of Gyn/Ecology.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex. Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women. Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not exist for white women. Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community, with the exception of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men. On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools. Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places. When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem. Historically, difference had been used so cruelly against us that as a people we were reluctant to tolerate any diversion from what was externally defined as Blackness. In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity — Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk. Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process. The 60s were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions. They were vital years of awakening, of pride, and of error. The civil rights and Black power movements rekindled possibilities for disenfranchised groups within this nation. Even though we fought common enemies, at times the lure of individual solutions made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can’t eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve. The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia. There is only the conscious focusing within each of my days to move against them, wherever I come up against these particular manifestations of the same disease. By seeing who the we is, we learn to use our energies with greater precision against our enemies rather than against ourselves.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread. We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen. For instance, how many times has this all been said before? For another, who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts? Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend. An example of this is the signal absence of the experience of women of Color as a resource for women’s studies courses. The literature of women of Color is seldom included in women’s literature courses and almost never in other literature courses, nor in women’s studies as a whole. All too often, the excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color can only be taught by Colored women, or that they are too difficult to understand, or that classes cannot “get into” them because they come out of experiences that are “too different.” I have heard this argument presented by white women of otherwise quite clear intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching and reviewing work that comes out of the vastly different experiences of Shakespeare, Molière, Dostoyefsky, and Aristophanes. Surely there must be some other explanation. This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons white women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves. To examine Black women’s literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities — as individuals, as women, as human — rather than as one of those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genunine images of Black women. And I believe this holds true for the literatures of other women of Color who are not Black.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  As a further reward, Miscavige offered Rathbun the opportunity to go to the Scientology ship, the Freewinds, and cruise the Caribbean for two years doing nothing but studying and training to be an auditor. Rathbun could finally obtain OT III. It was an offer he couldn’t resist. That was a rewarding time for Rathbun. But as soon as he got off the ship after his time away, Miscavige called him into his office and said, “I finally know who my SP is. The two years you were gone was the only unenturbulated time in my life.” He ordered him to Clearwater, his rank broken, as a trainee. That didn’t last, either. A number of tabloid sensations arose surrounding Scientology celebrities—Lisa Marie Presley was divorcing Michael Jackson, Kirstie Alley was divorcing actor Parker Stevenson—and Miscavige again turned to Rathbun to cool the press down. Then, on December 5, 1995, a Scientologist named Lisa McPherson died following a mental breakdown. She had rear-ended a boat that was being towed in downtown Clearwater, Florida, near the church’s spiritual headquarters. When paramedics arrived, she stripped off her clothes and wandered naked down the street. She said she needed help and was taken to a nearby hospital. Soon afterward, a delegation of ten Scientologists arrived at the hospital and persuaded McPherson to check out, against doctors’ advice. McPherson spent the next seventeen days under guard in room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel. For Scientologists, McPherson’s mental breakdown presented a confounding dilemma. McPherson had been declared Clear just three months before, after ten years of courses and auditing and substantial contributions to the church. The process had been like “a gopher being pulled through a garden hose,” she later said, but it had been worth it. “I am so full of life I am overwhelmed at the joy of it all!” she wrote. “WOW!” Clears are supposed to be invulnerable to mental frailty. People on the base knew that McPherson had been acting strangely before her breakdown. Marty Rathbun, who was at Flag Base during this time, remembers seeing McPherson screaming in the hallways of the Fort Harrison Hotel, because she had just been declared Clear. “Aaaaaah! Yahoo!” she cried. She looked insane. How did she get to be Clear when she was obviously irrational? And who was responsible for deciding that she had achieved that state? According to Rathbun and several other former church officials who were present at the time, the case supervisor who pronounced Lisa McPherson Clear was David Miscavige. He had gone to Flag in the summer of 1995 to take over the auditing delivered at the base. He would also supervise the treatment of McPherson that followed.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  IN THE SPACE of a year, Hubbard had gone from destitution and obscurity to great wealth and international renown, followed by a crashing descent. The foundation he had created to train auditors plummeted into debt and soon declared bankruptcy. Close supporters, such as John Campbell and Dr. Winter, deserted. Dianetics proved to be a fad that had swept the country, infatuating tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, but then burned itself out more quickly than the hula hoop. Once again, Hubbard got a house trailer, and this time he drove it to Lawrence, Kansas, where Russell Hays now lived. Hays instructed Hubbard to park his trailer on some raw land he owned nearby. “That didn’t please him,” Hays said. “I wouldn’t want to have to live with him, he’d get on my nerves.” Hubbard was drinking and had a number of drugs along with him, and he pressed Hays to supply him with marijuana. Hays later dried some horseweed and mailed it to Hubbard, signing the letter, “I. M. Reefer.” Hays advised the discouraged Hubbard to make use of his extensive mailing list. There were many followers who still believed in the man and his method. Some had had meaningful emotional breakthroughs. Others had experiences—such as leaving their bodies—that conclusively proved to them the validity of Hubbard’s claims. These acolytes provided the bedrock of support that Hubbard needed to regenerate his broken organization, rebuild his finances, and repair the stain on his reputation caused by his personal scandals. In addition to Hubbard’s relentless self-confidence, several new factors salvaged his movement. He had a new device, the E-Meter, developed by one of his followers, which Hubbard revealed in March 1952. The E- Meter would replace the Dianetic reverie with what appeared to be a more scientific approach, one that didn’t look so much like a hypnotic trance. “It sees all, knows all,” Hubbard declared. “It is never wrong.” And he had a new wife, Mary Sue Whipp, a petite Texan, twenty years his junior, whom he married that same month. She was already pregnant with the first of their four children. Hubbard also had a new name for his movement. From now on, it was Scientology. 1 According to the church, “There was something under the water and it was definitely hostile, and after they dropped their charges, there was oil and something sunk.... It definitely happened.” 2 A conspicuous example of Dianetic processing involved John Brodie, the outstanding quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, who suffered an injury to his throwing arm in 1970 that threatened to end his career. Despite the best medical attention and physical therapy, his elbow remained sore and swollen. Finally, he went to Phil Spickler, a Scientologist and Dianetic auditor, who asked Brodie to tell him about previous incidents that might be keeping his arm from healing.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Whenever Cruise traveled abroad to promote his movies, he used the opportunity to lobby foreign leaders and American ambassadors to promote Scientology. Davis usually accompanied him on these diplomatic and lobbying missions. Cruise repeatedly consulted with former president Clinton, lobbying him to get prime minister Tony Blair’s help in getting the Church of Scientology declared a tax-deductible charitable organization in the United Kingdom. Rathbun was present for one telephone call in which Clinton advised Cruise he would be better served by contacting Blair’s wife, Cherie, rather than the prime minister, because she was a lawyer and “would understand the details.” Later, Cruise went to London, where he met with a couple of Blair’s representatives, although nothing came of those efforts. In 2003, he met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to express the church’s concerns over its treatment in Germany. Cruise had access to practically anyone in the world. That same year, Cruise and Davis lobbied Rod Paige, the secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, to endorse Hubbard’s study tech educational methods. Paige had been impressed. For months, Cruise kept in contact with Paige’s office, urging that Scientology techniques be folded into the president’s No Child Left Behind program. One day Cruise flew his little red-and-white-striped Pitts Special biplane, designed for aerobatics, to Hemet, along with his Scientologist chief of staff, Michael Doven. Miscavige and Rathbun picked them up and drove them to Gold Base. Rathbun was in the backseat and recalls Cruise boasting to COB about his talks with the secretary. “Bush may be an idiot,” Miscavige observed, “but I wouldn’t mind his being our Constantine.” Cruise agreed. “If fucking Arnold can be governor, I could be president.” Miscavige responded, “Well, absolutely, Tom.” 2 IN 2001, Haggis was fired from Family Law, the show he had created. His career, which for so long seemed to be a limitless staircase toward fame and fortune, now took a plunge. He began working at home. Within a week, he started writing a movie script called Million Dollar Baby, based on a series of short stories by F. X. Toole. He spent a year working on it, drawing upon some of his own painful memories. He identified with the character of a sour old boxing coach, Frankie Dunn. Like Haggis, Frankie is estranged from his daughter. His letters to her are returned. He turns to religion, going to Mass every day and seeking a forgiveness that he doesn’t really believe in. Into the coach’s dismal life comes another young woman, Maggie Fitzgerald, an aspiring boxer from a white trash background.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The stated goal was to rewrite the navigation guide of the Alaskan coast using new radio techniques; however, when the engine broke down in Ketchikan, he told a local newspaper that the purpose was “two-fold, one to win a bet and another to gather material for a novel of Alaskan salmon fishing.” Some of Hubbard’s friends, he related, had wagered that his boat was too small for such a journey, and he was determined to prove them wrong. While he was stranded in Ketchikan, waiting for a new crankshaft, Hubbard spent several weeks regaling listeners of the local KGBU radio about his adventures, which included tracking down a German agent who had been planted in Alaska with orders to cut off communications in the case of war, and lassoing a brown bear on a fishing trip, which proceeded to crawl into the boat with him. When the crankshaft finally arrived, Ron and Polly headed home, arriving a few days before Christmas 1940, nearly six months after they set out. Little had been accomplished. “Throughout all this, however,” the church narrative goes, “Mr. Hubbard was continuing in his quest to answer the riddles of man.” THE COMPETING NARRATIVES of Hubbard’s life arrive at a crucial point in the quarrel over his record in the US Navy during the Second World War and the injuries he allegedly received. He certainly longed for a military career, but he failed the entrance examination for the US Naval Academy and was further disqualified because of his poor eyesight. He lied—unnecessarily—about his age when he signed up for the US Marine Corps Reserve in 1930, backdating his birth by two years; this stratagem may have helped him get promoted over his contemporaries to first sergeant. His official record notes that he was “inactive, except for a period of active duty for training.” He requested to be discharged the following year because “I do not have the time to devote to the welfare of the Regiment.” Months before Pearl Harbor, however, Hubbard was once again angling to get a commission in the Navy. He gathered a number of recommendations, including one from his congressman, Warren G. Magnuson, who wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt, praising “Captain” Hubbard, “a well-known writer” and “a respected explorer,” who has “marine masters papers for more types of vessels than any other man in the United States.... In writing organizations he is a key figure, making him politically potent nationally.” The congressman concluded: “An interesting trait is his distaste for personal publicity.” Senator Robert M. Ford of Washington signed his name to another letter of recommendation that Hubbard actually wrote for him: “This will introduce one of the most brilliant men I have ever known: Captain L. Ron Hubbard.” In April 1941, his poor eyesight caused him to fail his physical once again.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I came across this term civilized before, and I wondered whether it was a term used around Americans or whether it meant up to American standards. Increasingly I get a feeling that American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be reckoned with. This is rather disappointing. But coming back to the hotel, I notice that the fixtures here are a little shabby, but they do work, and the studio beds are a bit adolescent in size, but they are comfortable. For a youth hostel it’s better than I would ever hope for. Of course, I can’t help but wonder why the African-Asian Conference people should be housed in a youth hostel, particularly an “uncivilized” one, but I don’t imagine that I’ll ever get an answer to that. All hotel rooms cost the same in the Soviet Union. Utilities, from my conversation with Helen while we were riding the Metro down to send a cable, utilities are very inexpensive. The gas to cook with costs sixteen kopecs a month which is less than one ruble (about $3.00) and the most electricity Helen says that she uses, when she’s translating all day long in winter, costs three rubles a month. That is very expensive, she says. The two-room apartment which she and her mother share costs eight rubles a month. Oleg does not speak English, or does not converse in English. Like many other people I was to meet during my stay in Russia, he understands English although he does not let on. Oleg said through Helen that he wants me to know it was very important for us to meet other writers and that the point of the Conference was for us to get together. I thanked him for the twenty-five rubles I had been given as soon as I arrived here in Moscow, which I have been told was a gift from the Union of Soviet Writers for pocket money. I spoke of the oppressed people all over the world, meeting to touch and to share, I spoke of South Africa and their struggle. Oleg said something very curious. “Yes, South Africa is really very bad. It is like a sore upon the body that will not heal.” This sounded to me both removed and proprietary. Unclear. Willy, my South African poet friend, lives in Tanzania now and he may be here, which I am very excited about. III We traveled south to Uzbekistan for the Conference, a five-hour journey that became seven because of delays. We arrived in Tashkent after dark following a long, exhausting plane ride. As I have said, Russian planes are incredibly packed, every single inch being taken up in seats.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  His pace is quick and I seem always to be a few feet behind him, pausing to look up at birds or down at tree trunks to inspect overgrown mushrooms. “I bet you’re the kind of person who takes her kids on nature walks and stops to look at every bug and flower,” he says. “Oh, I definitely am,” I say. “And I bet you’re not?” He laughs, which is answer enough. I am disappointed that as we walk, he does not reach for my hand or stop to give me even a quick kiss – anything to acknowledge my physical presence. For years, I have pushed Michael’s hands away from me because they always seemed to be coming at me, grabbing and tapping and rubbing, so persistent and needy, but now that he’s gone, I crave being touched. I want to feel the warmth of skin, the pressure of a body against my own. After the walk, we go home to change our clothes. I take mine off and walk around the apartment naked, getting a glass of water and digging in my tote bag for a more evening-worthy outfit. “I like how comfortable you are with your body,” he says, watching me. “I like how you walk around with no clothes on and feel no need to cover up. But, one question: have you ever thought about shaving all the hair from your pussy?” he asks. “Well, no, I haven’t,” I say. “I mean, there’s just a small patch of hair anyway, it’s pretty well-trimmed.” “I think it’s hot when women have no pubic hair,” he says. “Really?” I ask, wrinkling my nose. “I think it looks prepubescent. I’ve never understood how men find that sexy.” “It just is,” he says. “Would you think about shaving it all off?” “No, I wouldn’t. I want to look like a woman, not a little girl,” I say. He approaches me, saying, “Oh you definitely look like a woman,” and then kisses me until I’ve backed up against the wall, where he spins me around so that my breasts are pressed against it and he enters me from behind. He wraps his arm around my waist to hold me in place and I let out a yelp of pain as he penetrates me too forcefully, but then we settle into a rhythm. I come quickly and then he does. Immediately, I can feel his semen dripping down my leg and look down to see it making a small puddle on the floor. When he walks away, I grab a paper towel to clean the floor and then join him to rinse off in the shower. We stopped using condoms when I agreed to be exclusive with him. He wants to see if any of his friends are hanging around the firehouse and asks if I mind stopping by before we go to the bar he is taking me to.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I make a note to have a chat with the doormen when I’m back home – I would like to feel I have some semblance of privacy, the same way Michael does. In the afternoon, Michael and the kids convince me to walk down the beach to snorkel with them, so we borrow goggles and flippers from the resort and waddle to the water. The snorkeling area is all the way at the end of the beach, where Blaze sits. Mercifully, he is not in his regular spot at the moment, though I see his kayak at the water’s edge, laden with ripe tropical fruit. We swim out until the ocean floor seems far beneath us and I float on my stomach, hearing nothing but my breath as I gaze into the turquoise water and watch schools of brightly colored fish dart around me. It is serene and imperturbable here, and I’m grateful my kids knew to drag me here despite my wanting to be left alone like a sloth with my book. When I finally lift my head, I see Blaze standing in the shallow end, watching me. I raise my hand to acknowledge him, and he is still standing there a few minutes later when we all swim back in. I linger for a moment as Michael and the kids run ahead to return the snorkeling gear and ready the next activity, a Sunfish. “Did you have a good time last night?” he asks me quietly. I smile and nod, so he asks if we can do it again. I demur, saying I’m not sure I can get away. The kids are gesturing to me so that they can take me for a sail, so I tell Blaze that I better go and that I will come back to talk to him after the sailing excursion. Hudson is excited to show us his sailing skills, and we let him zoom through the water with the wind at our backs. By the time we arrive back at the beach after capsizing and bobbing in the water, waiting for the resort’s motorboat to rescue us, Blaze is long gone for the day. I am both disappointed and relieved, as I still hadn’t decided if I had the energy to have another go with him. I love the attention from him, but I had my adventure and think I’m done now. CHAPTER 47AuthorshipLate afternoon is my favorite time of vacation days – a cooler breeze moving in, the crowds packed up and gone. Georgia and I stroll along the beach, holding hands and splashing the water with our feet. “I don’t want to leave here. I wish we could stay forever,” she says wistfully. “I know, me too. It’s such a special place. Just think, someday you can come back here when you’re all grown up with your own kids,” I say.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Rathbun said that, in January 2001, he got a call from Cruise asking for help. Cruise said that he and Kidman were finished. Cruise never offered a public explanation for the divorce, and Kidman herself was clearly surprised by his decision. She later revealed that she had suffered a miscarriage two months after Cruise moved out, and she had asked the doctors to preserve samples of the fetus’s DNA to prove that Cruise was the father. She pleaded with him to undergo marriage counseling at the church. Cruise refused, publicly declaring, “Nic knows exactly why we are getting a divorce.” This was a decisive moment in Cruise’s relationship with Scientology. Rathbun provided the star with more than two hundred hours of auditing over the next couple of years. From July through Thanksgiving, 2001, Rathbun was with Cruise at the Celebrity Centre frequently, doing auditing rundowns and the PTS/SP (Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons) course. He paired Cruise with another actor, Jason Beghe, to do training drills; for instance, Beghe would think of a hypothetical date, which Cruise had to figure out, using the E-Meter, an exercise Cruise found really frustrating. A young man named Tommy Davis began acting as Rathbun’s assistant. He brought sandwiches and helped out with Cruise’s children, making sure they were receiving church services. Despite his youth, Davis was already a unique figure in the church: He was a second- generation Scientologist, a Sea Org member, and the scion of the Hollywood elite. His mother was Anne Archer, a talented and popular actress who had starred in a number of movies, including Patriot Games and Fatal Attraction, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She had been a deeply committed Scientologist since she began studying with Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in her twenties. She had always been proud to associate herself with Scientology in public, speaking at innumerable events on behalf of the church. Her son Tommy embodied the aspiration of the church to establish itself in the Hollywood community; indeed, he was living proof that it had done so. He had known Cruise since he was eighteen years old, so it was natural that he soon became the church’s liaison with the star, reporting directly to Shelly Miscavige. He had a relationship with Cruise similar to the one that Spanky Taylor once enjoyed with John Travolta. Rathbun assigned Davis to sit with Cruise in the parking lot of Home Depot in Hollywood while the star was doing his Tone Scale drills —guessing the emotional state of random people coming out of the store.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I believe in your good faith toward all women, in your vision of a future within which we can all flourish, and in your commitment to the hard and often painful work necessary to effect change. In this spirit I invite you to a joint clarification of some of the differences which lie between us as a Black and a white woman. When I started reading Gyn/Ecology , I was truly excited by the vision behind your words and nodded my head as you spoke in your First Passage of myth and mystification. Your words on the nature and function of the Goddess, as well as the ways in which her face has been obscured, agreed with what I myself have discovered in my searches through African myth/legend/religion for the true nature of old female power. So I wondered, why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are her goddess images only white, western european, judeo-christian? Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? Well, I thought, Mary has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope and to deal only with the ecology of western european women. Then I came to the first three chapters of your Second Passage, and it was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. I began to feel my history and my mythic background distorted by the absence of any images of my foremothers in power. Your inclusion of African genital mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any consideration of female ecology, and too little has been written about it. To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other . To dismiss our Black foremothers may well be to dismiss where european women learned to love. As an African-american woman in white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted and trivialized, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own. When I speak of knowledge, as you know, I am speaking of that dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this depth within each of us that nurtures vision. What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of all other noneuropean women, and denied the real connections that exist between all of us. It is obvious that you have done a tremendous amount of work for this book.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I only wrote the book because he wrote one for me. It seemed fair. Most people text, or call, or write e-mails. My love and I write each other books. Hey! Here’s a hundred thousand words of ‘Why the hell did we break up anyway?’ It was Nick who had finally crippled me; it was Nick who took my belief away. And I decided sometime after I filed the restraining order against Isaac that it was a story worth telling. When we broke up it was his choice. Nick liked to love me. I was not like him, and he valued that. I think I made him feel more like an artist because he didn’t know how to suffer until I came into his life. But he didn’t understand me. He tried to change me. And that was our destruction. And then Isaac read that book to me, perched on the edge of my hospital bed, my breasts sitting in a medical waste container somewhere. Suddenly I was hearing Nick’s thoughts, seeing myself as he saw me, and I heard him calling to me. Nick Nissley was perfect. Perfect looking, perfectly flawed, perfect in everything he said. His life was graceful and his words were whetted to poignancy—both written and spoken. But he didn’t mean any of them. And that was the greatest disappointment. He was a pretender, trying to grasp what it felt like to live. So, he found me looking at a lake and grabbed me. Because I wore a shroud of darkness and he wanted desperately to understand what that was like. I was charmed for a while. Charmed that someone so gifted was interested in me. I thought that by being with him, his talent would rub off on me. I was always waiting to see what he would do next. How he would handle the waitress who spilled an entire dish of pumpkin curry on his pants (he took his pants off and ate his meal in boxers); or what he would say to the fan who tracked him down and showed up at his door while we were having sex (he signed her book half leaning out the door with his hair ruffled and a sheet wrapped around his waist). He taught me how to write by simply existing—and existing well. I can’t say for sure when it was that I fell in love with him. It might have been when he told me that I had a mud vein. It might have been days later when I realized it was true. But whatever moment it took for my heart to decide to love him, it decided swiftly, and it decided for me.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance. Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist. Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.

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

  This “Higher Criticism” revealed that there was no univocal message in scripture; that Moses had not written the Pentateuch, which was composed of at least four different sources; that the miracle stories were little more than a literary trope; and that King David was not the author of the psalms. A little later Charles Lyell (1797–1875) argued that the earth’s crust had not been shaped by God but by the incremental effects of wind and water; Charles Darwin (1809–82) put forward the hypothesis that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same protoape as the chimpanzee; and studies revealed that the revered philosopher Immanuel Kant had actually undercut the entire Enlightenment project by maintaining that our ways of thinking bear no relation to objective reality. In Europe the rising tide of unbelief was born not merely from skepticism but from a hunger for radical social and political change. The Germans had been enthralled by the French Revolution, but the social and political situation in their country ruled out anything similar; it seemed better to try to change the way people thought than to resort to violence. By the 1830s, a radical cadre of intellectuals had emerged who were theologically literate, were particularly incensed by the social privileges of the clergy, and saw the Lutheran Church as a bastion of conservatism. As part of this corrupt Old Regime, they argued, the churches had to go, together with the God who had supported the system. Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheistic statement The Essence of Christianity (1841) was avidly read as a revolutionary as well as a theological tract. 140 In the United States, however, the urban elite had been appalled by the violence of the French Revolution and used Christianity to promote the social reform that would hold such turbulence at bay. Lyell’s revelations had caused a brief panic, but most Americans remained convinced by Newton’s vision of a design in the universe that proved the existence of an intelligent, benign Creator. These more liberal Christians were open to the Higher Criticism and willing to “christen” Darwinism, largely because they had not yet fully absorbed its implications. Evolution was not yet the bogey in America that it would become during the 1920s. At this point the liberal elite believed that God had been at work in the process of natural selection and that humanity was gradually evolving to a greater spiritual perfection. 141 After the Civil War, demoralized by their failure to resolve the slavery question, many of the Evangelicals withdrew from public life, realizing that they had marginalized themselves politically. 142 Their religion thus became separate from their politics, a private affair—just as the Founders had hoped. Instead of bringing a Christian voice to the great questions of the day, they turned inward, and perhaps because the Bible had seemed to fail them in the nation’s darkest hour, they became preoccupied with the minutiae of biblical orthodoxy. That retreat was in some ways a positive development.

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

  Revolutionary France did not bring liberty to the peoples of Europe, however; instead, Napoleon, the revolution’s heir, created a traditional tributary empire that threatened the imperial ambitions of Britain. In 1798, to establish a base in Suez that would cut off the British sea routes to India, Napoleon invaded Egypt and at the Battle of the Pyramids inflicted a devastating defeat on the Mamluk army: only ten French soldiers were killed, but the Mamluks lost more than two thousand men.85 With consummate cynicism, Napoleon then presented himself as the liberator of the Egyptian people. Carefully briefed by the French Institut d’Égypte, he addressed the sheikhs of the Azhar madrassa in Arabic, expressing his deep respect for the Prophet and promising to free Egypt from the oppression of the Ottomans and their Mamluk agents. Accompanying the French army was a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The ulema were not impressed: “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery,” they said, “to entice us.”86 They were right. Napoleon’s invasion, exploiting Enlightenment scholarship and science to subjugate the region, marked the beginning of Western domination of the Middle East. To many it seemed that the French Revolution had failed. The systemic violence of Napoleon’s empire betrayed revolutionary principles, and Napoleon also reinstated the Catholic Church. For decades the hopes of 1789 were dashed by one disillusioning event after another. The glory days of the fall of the Bastille were followed by the September Massacres, the Reign of Terror, the Vendée genocide, and a military dictatorship. After Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814, Louis XVIII (the brother of Louis XVI) was returned to the throne. But the republican dream refused to die. The republic was revived for two brief periods, during the Hundred Days before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and for a brief period between 1848 and 1852. In 1870 it was restored yet again, this time lasting until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  he himself being the successor of Peter, and the true vicar of Christ, the head of the whole Church, the father and teacher of all Christians, to whom, in Peter, Christ gave authority to feed, govern and rule the universal Church."347 This remarkable concession was modified by a clause in the original document, running, "according as it is defined by the acts of the oecumenical councils and by the sacred canons."348 The Latins afterwards changed the clause so as to read, "even as it is defined by the oecumenical councils and the holy canons." The Latin falsification made the early oecumencial councils a witness to the primacy of the Roman pontiff. The articles of union were incorporated in a decree349 beginning Laetentur coeli et exultat terra, "Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad." It declared that the middle wall of partition between the Occidental and Oriental churches has been taken down by him who is the cornerstone, Christ. The black darkness of the long schism had passed away before the ray of concord. Mother Church rejoiced to see her divided children reunited in the bonds of peace and love. The union was due to the grace of the Holy Ghost. The articles were signed July 5 by 115 Latins and 33 Greeks, of whom 18 were metropolitans. Archbishop Mark of Ephesus was the only one of the Orientals who refused to sign. The patriarch of Constantinople had died a month before, but wrote approving the union. His body lies buried in S. Maria Novella, Florence. His remains and the original manuscript of the articles, which is preserved in the Laurentian library at Florence, are the only relics left of the union. On July 6, 1439, the articles were publicly read in the cathedral of Florence, the Greek text by Bessarion, and the Latin by Cesarini. The pope was present and celebrated the mass. The Latins sang hymns in Latin, and the Greeks followed them with hymns of their own. Eugenius promised for the defence of Constantinople a garrison of three hundred and two galleys and, if necessary, the armed help of Western Christendom. After tarrying for a month to receive the five months of arrearages of his stipend, the emperor returned by way of Venice to his capital, from which he had been absent two years. The Ferrara agreement proved to be a shell of paper, and all the parade and rejoicing at the conclusion of the proceedings were made ridiculous by the utter rejection of its articles in Constantinople. On their return, the delegates were hooted as Azymites, the name given in contempt to the Latins for using unleavened bread in the eucharist. Isidore, after making announcement of the union at Of en, was seized and put into a convent, from which he escaped two years later to Rome.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  It was one he would face soon in any case. In 1983, Haggis’s writing partner on the TV series Diff’rent Strokes, Howard Meyers, who was also a Scientologist, decided to follow a splinter group led by David Mayo, who had been one of the highest officials in the church. Haggis told Meyers that he couldn’t work with him anymore. Because Meyers was the senior writer on the show, Haggis resigned and went looking for other work. 1 Travolta’s attorney denies there was an agreement to visit Spanky in exchange for his personal copy of Saturday Night Fever. 5 Dropping the Body Hubbard never lost his interest in being a movie director. He wrote innumerable scripts for Scientology training films, but he still thought he could take over Hollywood. He had particularly high hopes for one script, “Revolt in the Stars,” that was based on one of his novels. Inspired by the thunderous success of Star Wars, Hubbard worked on the script in 1979 with the legendary acting teacher Milton Katselas with the aim of having it made into a feature film. A journeyman theater and film director before taking over the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Katselas had directed the 1972 film Butterflies Are Free, starring Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert (Eileen Heckart won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). He was a vital link to the Hollywood celebrity machine that Scientology depended upon. The list of his protégés included Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, George C. Scott, Alec Baldwin, Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Gene Hackman, George Clooney, and many other now-familiar names. His invitation-only Saturday master class was seen by many young actors as a portal to stardom. He attained OT V status and was one of the most profitable sources of recruits for the church, receiving in return a 10 percent commission on the money contributed by his students. At one point, Katselas asked if he could join the Sea Org, but Hubbard told him it was more important to continue doing what he was doing. When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script of “Revolt in the Stars,” Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Catherine Harrington, to Hollywood to make a deal. After the Moroccan adventure, Hubbard had appointed her his Personal Public Relations Officer. Harrington came from a moneyed background, and she knew how to talk about finances. She shopped the script around and found a buyer willing to offer $10 million—which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told. The Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf. Harrington wound up being sent to the RPF, and when she balked at that, she was demoted even further—to the RPF’s RPF, alone, in the furnace room under the parking garage of the Clearwater base. The script never did get made into a film.