Excitement

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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  What’s going on? Why does he say it like that? Because the campaign is already under way, and if John is the “preliminary messenger” of Malachi 3–4, this can only mean one thing. John had sent messengers to Jesus to ask if he was indeed “the one who is to come,” and the answer, given cryptically but plainly enough for those with ears to hear, is an emphatic yes. Jesus was well aware that what he was doing didn’t fit with what people were expecting. But he believed that he was indeed launching God’s kingdom campaign. He was the one in whose presence, work, and teaching Israel’s God was indeed becoming king. The campaign, you see, isn’t about someone running for office as happens in our modern democracies. Jesus isn’t going around trying to drum up support like today’s politicians. He is much more like a rebel leader within a modern tyranny, setting up an alternative government, establishing his rule, making things happen in a new way. He chooses twelve of his closest followers and seems to set them apart as special associates. For anyone with eyes to see, this says clearly that he is reconstituting God’s people, Israel, around himself. Israel hadn’t had twelve tribes since the eighth century BC, when the Assyrians came and captured the northern kingdom, leaving only Benjamin and Judah (“the Jews”) in the south, plus any Levites who remained with them. But some of the prophets had spoken of the day when all the tribes would be gathered again. Jesus’s choice of the twelve seems to indicate, symbolically, that this is how he wanted his work to be seen. This is a campaign. It’s a rebel movement, a risky movement, a would-be royal movement under the nose of the present would-be “king of the Jews,” Herod Antipas himself. But before we can explore all this further, we must examine in more detail the stories Jesus was telling. What are they about? How do they explain this strange new announcement that God is in charge? How do they help the campaign move forward? Chapter 8 Stories That Explain and a Message That Transforms JESUS, AS WE SAW, had one particular method of explaining what was going on. As part of his campaign, he told stories. Not just any old stories. These stories were, for the most part, not “illustrations,” preachers’ tricks to decorate an abstract or difficult thought, to sugarcoat the pill of complicated teaching. If anything, they were the opposite. They were stories designed to tease, to clothe the shocking and revolutionary message of God’s kingdom in garb that left the hearers wondering, trying to think it out, never quite able (until near the end) to pin Jesus down. They were stories that, eventually, caused some to decode his deep, rich message in such a way as to frame a charge against him, either of blasphemy, sedition, or “leading the people astray.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is the claim that Andy denies and Billy postpones. Do Chris and Davie have anything better to offer? Chris is excited about the vision of Paul in Colossians, according to which Jesus is already in charge of the world. Paul declares that “the gospel has been announced in all creation under heaven” (1:23), and he can’t mean that every human being then alive had heard about Jesus. He must mean that with Jesus’s death and resurrection something happened to the very structure of the cosmos itself: a kind of deep-level earthquake running through all reality. So Chris declares that the lordship of Jesus isn’t a matter of church members going out and telling people about him, or working to improve the world. That, Chris thinks, is simply dualistic, as though the church is “outside” the world and trying to “do things to it.” Instead, it’s a matter of the church waking up to what God is doing in the world already. The signs of Jesus’s kingdom are to be seen, Chris suggests enthusiastically, in the movements of thought and belief that shape the lives of millions. Chris is old enough to remember the groundswell of horror that, in the 1960s, recognized racism for what it was, in the United States and South Africa in particular, and worked to eliminate it. (It took longer in South Africa, but the movements were clearly related.) Such movements may or may not have been initiated or led by Christians; some were, some weren’t. That’s not the point: God isn’t confined to the church. Chris is now inclined to see a similar God-given groundswell of opinion in the feminist movement and the green agenda. For Chris, God is at work in the world, and our task is to see what he’s doing and to join in, to do it with him. That is how the kingship of Jesus is to be worked out in the world today. Davie pours cold water on Chris’s hot-headed enthusiasm. Chris is simply repeating what Hitler’s tame theologians said in the 1930s: “God has raised up the German nation to transform the world; the church must get in line and lend its support to what God is already doing.” That, Davie recalls, is partly why Karl Barth uttered his famous “No!” There are many times when the church needs to recognize quite other “forces” at work in the great movements of ideas and beliefs, forces that worship the idols of money, military power, blood and soil, and not least the supposed “life force” of sex itself. All these, Davie insists, drag the church down into a form of pantheism, where God and the world are simply confused with one another, and dark, deathly forces within the world are given a cheerful would-be Christian whitewashing.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In my country, football clubs and their supporters get very excited when a new star player arrives. The announcement is made: we have a new star! At last, we’re going to score some goals! He’ll make all the difference. But they get even more excited when, after months or years of indifferent management, a new head coach (or “manager”) is appointed, especially if he comes with a reputation for turning things around and getting a club back on a winning streak. We’ve got a new boss! Everything’s going to change now! This is an announcement about something that’s happened because of which everything will be different. It isn’t a piece of advice about how to live or a clue about how to give up watching football altogether now that the team have been playing so badly. It’s a proclamation. Once the new coach has been announced, the players had better do what he says. Then, and only then, things will work out properly. The same thing is true under a great empire. When Caesar’s herald comes into town and declares “We have a new emperor,” it isn’t an invitation to debate the principle of imperial rule. It isn’t the offer of a new feeling inside. It’s a new fact, and you’d better readjust your life around it. Of course, for a football club what then often happens is that within weeks, or even days, disappointment begins to set in. The team doesn’t magically start winning all the trophies. And so another cycle begins. Maybe one day we’ll get someone who can really sort it out, can really turn it around . . . Countries go through this cycle too. I remember the excitement and delight when Tony Blair won the British general election in 1997. The country gave a sigh of relief, because the old government had run into trouble and run out of ideas, and now they were run out of town. Now at last we have a new vision! A new leader! Everything’s going to be all right! But, with the sad wisdom of hindsight, many people are embarrassed at how enthusiastic they were on that occasion. The “New Labour party” turned out to be like all the rest, getting some things right and a lot of things wrong. I have watched other countries go through similar ups and downs. I remember the joy of many when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008, and I watched that joy turn to frustration when things didn’t magically improve overnight. (I have also watched the horror of many at that same election, and I have watched that horror turn into paranoia.) We treat our political leaders as heroes and demigods; they carry our dreams, our fantasies of how things should be. When we find out that they are only human after all, we turn on them, blaming them for the intractable problems that they, like their predecessors, haven’t been able to solve.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She said, to Ida and Vivaldo, “It’s got something to do with this movie we’re going to see.” “Well, you’ve got to tell us,” Ida said, “or we simply won’t go in.” She raised her voice in the direction of Eric’s back: “We do know other actors.” “Come on, Cass,” said Vivaldo, “you’ve got to tell us now.” But Cass looked again in Eric’s direction, with a small, frowning smile. “ Let me tell them, sweetheart.” He turned, smiling, with the tickets in his hand. “I don’t know how to stop you,” he said. He moved over to Cass, and put one arm around her shoulder. “Well,” said Cass, smaller than ever, and more radiant—and, as she spoke, Eric watched her with an amused and loving smile—“Eric doesn’t have much of a part in this movie, he only appears in one or two scenes and he’s only got a couple of lines—” “ Three scenes,” said Eric, “ one line. If one of you sneezes, you die.” “—but on the strength of this —” cried Cass. “Well, not only on the strength of this,” said Eric. “Will you let the girl talk?” asked Vivaldo. “Go on, Cass.” “—on the strength of this particular performance”— “—exposure,” said Eric. “Oh, shit,” cried Vivaldo. “He’s a perfectionist,” Cass said. “He’s going to be a dead one, too,” said Ida, “If he doesn’t stop hogging this scene. Lord, would I hate to work with you. Please go on, Cass.” “Well, telegrams and phone calls have been coming out of Hollywood asking Eric if he will play—–” and she looked up at Eric. “Well, don’t stop now,” cried Ida. Eric, now, was very pale. “They’ve got some wild idea out there of making a movie version of The Possessed —” “The Dostoievski novel,” said Cass. “Thanks,” said Vivaldo, “and—–?” “They want me to play Stavrogin,” said Eric. A total silence fell, and they all stared at Eric, who looked uneasily back at them. There gleamed a small crown of sweat on his forehead, just below the hairline. Vivaldo felt a mighty tug of jealousy and fear. “Wow!” he said. Eric looked at him, seeming to see into his heart; and his brow puckered slightly, as though he were stiffening himself for a quarrel. “It’s probably going to be an awful movie,” he said, “can you imagine them doing The Possessed ? I didn’t really take it seriously until my agent called me. And then Bronson called me, too, because, you see, there’s going to be a kind of conflict with Happy Hunting Ground . We’re set to go into rehearsal next month, and, who knows? maybe it’ll be a hit.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The content too does not then disappoint. Here is a sower sowing seed. The wise first-century Jew, hearing this, may suspect that this is about God sowing Israel again after the time of tragedy, the sorrow of the exile. Yes, says Jesus, but see what heaven’s perspective on this is going to be. Israel is indeed to be sown again. But there will be many who look and look, but never see, who hear and hear, but never understand. Many seeds will fall on the path, on rocky ground, and among thorns. Israel is not to be reaffirmed as it stands. John the Baptist got it right: you can’t just say “Abraham is our father,” because the axe is laid to the roots of the tree (another scriptural metaphor for the judgment of Israel), and God can now raise up children for Abraham from these stones (Matt. 3:9–10). Jesus echoes that elsewhere: many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom—those who are presuming on ancestral heritage rather than grasping the chance of the kingdom itself now that it’s here—will be cast out (Matt. 8:11–12). Jesus is telling his contemporaries what heaven’s verdict is right now, what heaven’s action on earth looks like now, and he is using the best possible medium for doing so, the apocalyptic tradition of story-plus-interpretation, which allows the bifocal vision of heaven and earth, the simultaneous translation from the one language into the other, to take effect. Not all the stories, of course, work in this way. Jesus is anything but a wooden, stilted teacher, a one-string fiddle or a one-tune wonder. Some of the stories amount to pithy sayings or extended metaphors heavy with the hidden excitement of a new world waiting to be born. Think of the wedding guests being unable to fast, because the bridegroom is there with them, or the new wine needing new wineskins: Then John’s disciples came to him with a question. “How come,” they asked, “we and the Pharisees fast a good deal, but your disciples don’t fast at all?” “Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,” replied Jesus, “as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.” “No one,” he went on, “sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. People don’t put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the skins will split; then the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.” (Matt. 9:14–17)

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Those are the internal dynamics of the western wind, the howling gale of contemporary skepticism. Meanwhile, however, millions around the world, and tens of thousands in Britain and the United States too, tell a different story. They claim to have discovered Jesus as a living, challenging, healing presence. Stories abound of changed lives, of physical and emotional healing. New churches have sprung up, full of eager and excited people, often young people. Addicts are cured. Dysfunctional families are reunited. Real help is given to the sick, the poor, the prisoners. Failing schools are turned around. New energy is found for creative social and cultural projects. For such people, the whole thing is real enough. It’s hard to argue with a radically changed life or, indeed, with still being alive when the doctors had given you up for dead. That’s why there is such energy behind the northern high-pressure system, the powerful force of a newly energized, but often very “conservative” Christian faith. Many skeptics simply ignore these current Christian phenomena. Many of these newer, high-octane Jesus-followers simply return the compliment. That’s unhealthy—on both sides. We need to think things through. Jesus himself was open to all comers. He told his followers to love God with their minds as well as every other part of themselves. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain by proper inquiry. For what it’s worth, my long-lasting impression is that the “Jesus” who gets caught in the cross fire of these cultural wars may be considerably less than the Jesus we actually find in the pages of the early Christian writings—and in real, first-century history itself. After all, just as it’s quite possible for skeptics to be mistaken, so it’s quite possible, as church history shows in plenty, for devout Jesus-followers to be mistaken as well. It is vital to look again at Jesus himself. Two Jesus Myths There are, then, two myths that swirl around our heads, around the churches, around the TV studios, and around the editorial offices of newsmagazines. Let’s name them even more clearly and, to some extent, shame them, so we can be clear about the present confusions before we turn to the equally confusing world of the first century. We’ll take them in the reverse order this time. First, the high-pressure system of conservative Christianity. Here we find the classic Western Christian myth about Jesus, which is still believed by millions around the world.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Sorry. I’m experiencing a little more pain just above my wrist, and a cold feeling in my hand. But it hurts good, it’s well worth it. I’m going to shift to the fist-fucking grip. Yeah, there we go. Yeah! To come for you here this evening, I think I’m going to adapt that scene in Zardoz: I’m going to think of a guy who is asked to masturbate inside a huge magnetic tunnel while three women superior beings observe his carpal tunnel. They are interested in determining with scientific certitude whether his masturbation contributes to his nervous inflammation. It almost certainly does, but they want to capture the images of the poor frail nerve leading to his hand getting squeezed and traumatized as he gives himself pleasure. They are trying out some brand-new fancy software that focuses the magnetic field in a new way. This software uses some tricks refined over at CERN, in fact. But this new software has a bug; it has a serious unintended side-effect on this masturbating man. They trim his pubic hair, they dot his dick in a tribal pattern, they shove him in the magnet, and they tell him to start jacking off, and then, as his hand is shuffling smoothly up and down on his penis, some kind of bizarre, anomalous micro-funnel develops in the universal core of time. A chronomaly. Within the magnet, time is sucked in on itself and twisted and compressed in such a way that the man’s nerve—which is where all the analytic strength of the resonating system is focused—his nerve acquires the ability to stop and start time’s progress at will. What happens is: the man’s arm heats up for a second, tingling, as if it’s in a microwave on defrost, and then he discovers that he can put humanity on hold every time he snaps his middle finger. He lets go of his dick and he tries it out. Like this: snap.” I snapped my fingers. At once I was lying in complete euphoric silence. My Fold-powers were back. I crawled out of the machine and walked naked into the control room, my weighty richard leading the way. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman was wearing headphones. She was leaning back in her chair, her hand resting thoughtfully on her mouth, frowning in concentration at a monitor that showed an image of me lying feet first, legs parted, with my hand clutching my erection. I’d never seen myself from that angle before. It was not a pretty sight. One of the associates was sitting at the other large monitor, which showed a long glowing thing that was apparently the nerve in my wrist done up in the usual intense greens and blues and oranges. The other woman, the Chinese woman, was standing behind Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, looking on.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  One evening after work very recently, needing to rev myself up to continue writing some section of this very document, I snapped time off and went for an indoor walk around the research buildings of Mass General, looking for ultracentrifuges and for the breathtaking women post-docs who use them. I again vaguely envisioned centrifuging some of my own cells, this time for the pure ideational rush of it: I could devote a whole Pause to placing small samples of my blood (or possibly sperm, though that seemed a needlessly cruel thing to do to my sperm) in every Sorvall and Beckman and Hitachi ultracentrifuge in Boston and Cambridge and setting them all on top speed. I would be anemic and listless by the end, but I wouldn’t care, because I would know that at that second my own perky little cells were being crushed into alternative world orders of protoplasm by exotic megagravities in expensive vacuums in every high-powered NIH-funded research program in the area, and that trickster knowledge would power me upward into raptures of self-knowledge and self-abandonment. But I didn’t actually do it, because I would then have had to clean all the bloody test tubes after their runs were completed, since I wouldn’t want to leave something as unsettling as provenanceless yellow plasma around for researchers to discover. Fear is my least favorite emotion; I want to be responsible for creating as little of it as possible. I did look at a fair number of ultracentrifuges, however, and what I noticed was that the big floor-model machines, the ones built in Palo Alto by Beckman Instruments, bore a surprisingly strong resemblance to clothes-washers. They were a little wider, and they were blue (which should be a standard color for washing machines but perplexingly is not), and a close look at the control panel revealed, in addition to familiar words like SPEED, TIME, and TEMP, the less laundry-relevant terms VACUUM and ROTOR—but they still had an oval opening in the top that you closed after loading with a simple latch, and their direct-drive motor (I learned this from flipping through a textbook in one of the lab’s libraries) operated on exactly the same induction principal as a Maytag’s. The huge difference between these two consumer durables (and I think one of the best things about centrifuge as a noun is the ghost of the word huge it safely contains) was that the Beckman machine could turn a rotor, fitted with eight or even twelve little cuvettes containing some biohazard or other, at sixty thousand r.p.m. In other words, it could dependably spin, without flying apart, or overheating, or making disturbing noises (I noticed that it was quieter than a washing machine), at a rate of over one thousand revolutions per second.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Are you a heavy user of the backspace key?” she asked. “Several of my patients have reconfigured their keyboard so that they controlled the backspace key with their left hands, eliminating that constant reaching up with the little finger as they corrected their typos, and they improved immediately.” “Interesting. Maybe that’s it,” I said, nodding thoughtfully, signaling that I was thinking of something else. “Maybe that’s it.” “Well? What were you going to attribute it to?” the doctor asked. “How shall I put this? The stories I write are quite—they’re pornographic stories.” She took this in. Her face was sensual and intelligent and canny. “I don’t see why what you write would make a bit of difference to your wrist. A letter f is a letter f to the nerve concerned, no matter what risqué thing it happens to be spelling.” “That’s right,” I said eagerly, “and yet the letter e is the most frequent letter in English, right? And the letter e is a left-hand letter. So it should be as much a left-wrist problem as a right-wrist problem!” “That’s why I mentioned the backspace key,” the doctor explained patiently. “Or it could easily be the cursor keys, or the mouse. The mouse gives people terrible trouble.” “I use hot keys almost exclusively,” I said haughtily. “All I’m saying is, you have to look very carefully at how you really move at the keyboard and make some subtle changes. People think they can install a wrist pad or do a few exercises and everything will be hunky-dory. It doesn’t always work that way.” I looked at her name-tag. I liked very much that her first name was Susan. I said, “I’ll do that. But—what just occurred to me is—well—I write pornography.” “I know. So?” “Well, as I write I often find that I get myself in something of a lather. I imagine someone reading it, you know, a female someone reading it, and I find that …” I held my hands out as if what I was going to say was self-evident. Suddenly she understood and laughed. “Ah, ah, ah. You’re just trying to tell me that you masturbate while you write.” “Exactly,” I said with relief. “With my right hand.” “Constantly? Are you constantly masturbating while you write?” “Not constantly, no. I’ll type, say, a word or a phrase and then masturbate a little, and then another phrase, masturbate a little more, like that.” “Are these alternating sessions protracted?” asked Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, after a pause. “Sometimes. I once wrote a story on the hood of a car for twelve straight hours.” “Masturbating intermittently the entire time? I take it you were in a secluded spot.” “It’s a spot that’s accessible only to me.” “Good.” I gave her an inquiring look. “Is this an area that you would be interested in studying?” I asked her.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 15THAT WAS WHAT I-FINALLY RECORDED ON THE CASSETTE THAT I put in the tape-player in Adele Junette Spacks’s Ford Escort in place of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing. It—Part Two—was sixteen single-spaced pages long, and it took, in addition to the twelve long hours and two fiercely snuffling orgasms I devoted to its composition, another two hours to record on tape. (I let both of my comeshots hop out directly onto the hazily indeterminate Mass Turnpike, my bottom scooched forward on the hood of my car so that my richard made a sort of hood ornament. Unable to endure the physically paradoxical contact of a surface going sixty miles an hour faster than they were, the sperm-drops began to sizzle on the roadway after a few minutes; they had vaporized completely in less than half an hour.) When I was done recording I didn’t feel exhausted—I felt exhilarated. My right wrist hurt a lot—this marked, if I’m not mistaken, the beginning of my carpal-tunnel problem, which has bothered me on and off since. It isn’t clear to me now why Marian’s adventures ended up being so unremittingly ane-oriented in content—I like to think it was just a matter of mood. After all, I had never typed the word butthole before in my life. It isn’t a word that comes up much in business correspondence. Private coarseness is a known high. What was just as important, I wanted to minimize the chance that this Smith College woman would find my audiotaped company tame, and an anus or two livens up any gathering. I wanted my rotterly imagination to feed rather than limit hers, to extend without strain as far as hers would go; and I hoped that whatever she didn’t like she could filter out. I hoped that she would realize that I was an unusual man, possibly worth knowing.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The very form of the parable thus embodies the content it is trying to communicate: heaven appearing on earth. The content too does not then disappoint. Here is a sower sowing seed. The wise first-century Jew, hearing this, may suspect that this is about God sowing Israel again after the time of tragedy, the sorrow of the exile. Yes, says Jesus, but see what heaven’s perspective on this is going to be. Israel is indeed to be sown again. But there will be many who look and look, but never see, who hear and hear, but never understand. Many seeds will fall on the path, on rocky ground, and among thorns. Israel is not to be reaffirmed as it stands. John the Baptist got it right: you can’t just say “Abraham is our father,” because the axe is laid to the roots of the tree (another scriptural metaphor for the judgment of Israel), and God can now raise up children for Abraham from these stones (Matt. 3:9–10). Jesus echoes that elsewhere: many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom—those who are presuming on ancestral heritage rather than grasping the chance of the kingdom itself now that it’s here—will be cast out (Matt. 8:11–12). Jesus is telling his contemporaries what heaven’s verdict is right now, what heaven’s action on earth looks like now, and he is using the best possible medium for doing so, the apocalyptic tradition of story-plus-interpretation, which allows the bifocal vision of heaven and earth, the simultaneous translation from the one language into the other, to take effect. Not all the stories, of course, work in this way. Jesus is anything but a wooden, stilted teacher, a one-string fiddle or a one-tune wonder. Some of the stories amount to pithy sayings or extended metaphors heavy with the hidden excitement of a new world waiting to be born. Think of the wedding guests being unable to fast, because the bridegroom is there with them, or the new wine needing new wineskins: Then John’s disciples came to him with a question. “How come,” they asked, “we and the Pharisees fast a good deal, but your disciples don’t fast at all? ” “Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,” replied Jesus, “as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.” “No one,” he went on, “sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. People don’t put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the skins will split; then the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.” (Matt.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I kept staring at her taillights. I saw her look up at me briefly in her rear-view mirror. Then she fluffed her massive coarsely wavy hair so that some of it fell over the whiplash projection on the back of her seat. The high small round chrome lock on the curve of her trunk looked a little like what I imagined her asshole might look like. I decided that I would survive whatever happened. I waited a polite interval and then pulled over into the fast lane and sped up to pass her. We were on a slight downgrade. As I came closer to her, the same swooning feeling as before swept over me, except that now I and not she was bringing about this unspoken thrill; when our profiles were even I didn’t look over, knowing that she knew that I was passing her and wouldn’t look at me, because the rule in highway flirtation was not to look on the second pass. Instead I hit the clutch pedal and glided freely for a second or two right next to her, setting myself up mentally for the disengagement of the temporal drive-train, and then very slowly I pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose; when I let go of them the Smith woman and I were still side by side on the Mass Pike, but we weren’t moving forward. My radio was silent.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “We’re going to take a brief tour before we go to your hotel,” he announced. “It’s not too late,” he added, clearly for Danny’s benefit. “You can’t spend your first night in Jerusalem without seeing more than this shit!” He gestured out of the window. “I want to get your imagination working. Give you some ‘inspiration.’ ” He spoke the last word in ironical inverted commas, but I could tell that he was serious. It was a good idea, and I sat back and waited for the commentary, the patter of the guided tour. Nothing was forthcoming. We drove on in silence, broken only when Danny had a furious altercation with another driver at some traffic lights, leaning across me to yell at him out of the window, which he had yanked down to let in the cold city air. There was much clashing of brakes and shouting. Everybody in the adjacent car joined in, and Joel added his own clearly insulting contributions from the backseat. Finally the other car screeched off in high dudgeon. “Bastards!” muttered Joel contemptuously. “Wind up your window! It’s freezing in here!” He sniffed. “You know,” he said in a lighter tone, “I think it’s snowing. Karen,” he suddenly shouted expansively, “you’ve brought the snow with you from London!” I peered through my window. “It doesn’t look as if it’s snowing to me.” Joel guffawed—that is the only word for the sound he made. “It’s the holy snow of Jerusalem,” he snapped. “You don’t see, you just believe!” I laughed too, because it was funny, but my laughter was lost in Joel’s roars of mirth; I would learn that he was always convulsed by his own jokes. The atmosphere in the car lightened, and I could tell that—if only because I had occasioned a witty remark of his own—Joel felt more friendly toward me.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It really was too bad that nobody had written a life of the Prophet to which Western people could relate. Then it hit me. Perhaps I should write it myself. I resumed my pacing, but this time thinking furiously. My book could set the Prophet in the context of his time, and I could angle it to a Western person who was confused by the controversy and had an inbuilt cultural suspicion of Islam. In the West we took it for granted that Islam was the religion of the sword; I myself had assumed that it was an inherently violent religion until I had started to study Islam seriously. In the new book, I could deal with this question when telling the story of Muhammad’s war with Mecca. When I described the Prophet’s relationship with his wives, I could discuss the position of women in Islam. I could look into the real meaning of the episode of the so-called Satanic verses that had inspired Rushdie’s novel, talk about the nature of scripture and what was entailed in the concept of divine inspiration. Feeling more excited and positive than I had felt for a long time, I went upstairs to my study, typed out an eight-page proposal, and faxed it to Felicity Bryan so that she could see it as soon as she came into the office on Monday morning. I was eager to begin, but it was months before we could find a publisher. Once again, most people who saw the proposal turned it down flat, convinced that the topic was too dangerous and that I would be joining Rushdie in hiding. There were the usual gloomy jeremiads. “Muslims won’t like it, you know,” a friend warned me solemnly. “They’ll see it as provocative to have not only a Westerner, but a Western woman, writing about their Prophet!” Others could not see why I wanted to get involved at all. I would appear to be siding with Islam, a position that would put me even further beyond the pale in London at the present time. It was just not politically correct right now. Finally, however, Liz Knights of Gollancz saw that the project had possibilities, and offered a small advance. Because I felt that time was of the essence, I agreed to deliver the manuscript on New Year’s Day 1991. Like The First Christian and The Gospel According to Woman, Muhammad began as a polemic. I wanted to refute the accusations of Rushdie’s partisans and set the record straight.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  A week after that I had a revelation while browsing in Kibbeson’s Discount House of Electricity on Mass Ave. after work. I realized that all I had to do was buy a handful of really cheap remaindered switches—perhaps the one-hundred-milliamp push-button switches with the twelve-millimeter bushings, which looked especially promising—and carry them around in my pants pocket. I had a hunch that if I held one tightly and pressed it with my thumb while thinking as hard as I could of an hourglass being spun in a centrifuge, I could easily force a minor concession from the elemental forces and descend into the temporal Cleft that way. Even if the switches burned out after only one Drop, as the race-track-transformer toggle had, they were cheap enough that I could afford it. I bought a bunch of different microswitches and tested them out on the street, fumbling with them in my pocket as I frowned out at the traffic. None of the momentary-connection push-buttons worked, to my surprise, but an undistinguished-looking plastic sixteen-amp spade-terminal rocker-switch did beautifully. I bought a dozen for five dollars.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Starting to feel nice,” called Marian politely. Then her voice changed to a command. “Now pump the brake. “She held the hem of her skirt with her chin so that she could look down at her spread vadge. The road was pounding the Van Dilden’s cockshape into her stinging cuntskin. She reached back and twisted the Fusilier in her ass. Her clit looked as if it were ready to jump up and propose a toast to old friends; the other end of the double-header was sitting solidly to one side of it, talking in the fast, even, confident nasty-rumor language that vibrators use with their clit-clients. She felt a gorgeous huge thick-muscled orgasm moving slowly up her legs and fanning out toward all orifices. She spat her skirt out. “Pump the brake harder!” she commanded again. “Oh shit! Oh God! That’s it. Pump it. Brake, brake, brake. That’s it, like that. FUCK ME WITH YOUR TRUCK! JACK THAT BIG UGLY DICK AND FUCK MY ASS WITH YOUR TRUCK!” The UPS man, his leg pushing the brake-pedal in rapid rhythm to the long white-knuckled strokes of his fist, looked as if he couldn’t hold back another second. The truck lurched and rocked. A box from Harry and David’s tumbled over beside Marian. She grunted down against her toys, feeling them stretch her sex-holes to the point of pain. “Now watch me come!” she called to the front seat. “Keep pumping the brake and watch this hot little cunt come! I’M COMING! AAAAAAAAH, fuck fuck fuck, coming, I’M COMING!” She pressed the silicone snake-head harder against her clit and let the truck-chassied orgasm bump and grind through her. The UPS man had his head cranked around and was watching her crammed crotch, pop-eyed. He made a vowelly groan and lifted his butt clear off the seat. “Oh, here it comes!” he said. With a final upward fist-stroke, his squat thick dick blew a united parcel of peckerpaste all over the sleeve of his uniform. “Ooh, yeah babe. Ooh yeah.” He put the truck in neutral and the two of them caught their breath. Marian stood unsteadily, smoothing her skirt. The Royal Welsh Fusilier fell out of her ass to the floor with a snakey thump. The UPS man sighed happily. “The tightest ship in the shipping business,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s me,” said Marian.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 1I AM GOING TO CALL MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY THE FERMATA, EVEN though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for the Fold. “Fold” is, obviously, another. Every so often, usually in the fall (perhaps mundanely because my hormone-flows are at their highest then), I discover that I have the power to drop into the Fold. A Fold-drop is a period of time of variable length during which I am alive and ambulatory and thinking and looking, while the rest of the world is stopped, or paused. Over the years, I have had to come up with various techniques to trigger the pause, some of which have made use of rocker-switches, rubber bands, sewing needles, fingernail clippers, and other hardware, some of which have not. The power seems ultimately to come from within me, grandiose as that sounds, but as I invoke it I have to believe that it is external for it to work properly. I don’t inquire into origins very often, fearing that too close a scrutiny will damage whatever interior states have given rise to it, since it is the most important ongoing adventure of my life.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tzu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads. In killing Muslims and Jews in the name of God, the Crusaders had simply projected their own fear and loathing onto a deity which they had created in their own image and likeness, thereby giving this hatred a seal of absolute approval. A personalized God can easily lead to this type of idolatry, which is why the more thoughtful Jews, Christians, and Muslims insisted that while you could begin by thinking of God as a person, God transcended personality as “he” went beyond all other human categories. I wrote the book with mounting excitement. It represented a quest and liberation for me. No wonder I had found it impossible to “believe” in God; no wonder my attempts to bludgeon myself into orthodox “faith” had led only to sterility, doubt, and exhaustion. No wonder I had never experienced this God in prayer. Some of the best mystics would have told me that instead of waiting for God to condescend to me, I should create my own theophanies, just as I cultivated an aesthetic sense that enabled me to experience the transcendence of art. The personalized God might work for other people, but he had done nothing for me. I was not a chronic failure, but had simply been working with a spirituality and theology that were wrong for me. My approach had been misguided. Because I had assumed that God was an objective fact, I had thought about God using the same kind of logical, discursive reflection that I employed in my secular life. Rational analysis is indispensable for mathematics, medicine, or science, but useless for God. The nuns were not to blame for teaching me to pray in this way, because (I now discovered) the whole of Western theology had been characterized by an inappropriate reliance upon reason alone, ever since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rationalism had achieved such spectacular results that empirical reason came to be regarded as the sole path to truth, and Western people started to talk about God as an objective, demonstrable fact like any other. The more intuitive disciplines of mythology and mysticism were discredited. This was the cause of many of the religious problems of our day, including my own. It was, therefore, with huge exhilaration that I completed my book one hot and sultry afternoon in July 1992 and sent the manuscript off to my publisher. There was a sense of wonder and delight as all the ideas I had gathered fitted together—and a heady freedom as the load that I had carried around for thirty years fell from my shoulders. I no longer needed to think about religion as a source of sorrow and secret shame.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Their ideals, expressed in such typically sixties slogans as “Do what you feel,” “Let it all hang out,” “Go with the flow,” and “Do your own thing,” were, on the face of it, the antithesis of the ideals of my convent, and yet there was also a similarity. Both boys had rejected the utilitarianism of their parents, yet, although they had no theological beliefs, they had embarked on what in other ways amounted to a religious quest. They had turned their backs on society, were seeking what gave life intrinsic value, and had rejected money and worldly success, just as I had when I had entered my convent. They had no time for institutional faith or the authoritarian structures of Christianity, but practiced transcendental meditation in the hope of changing their thought structures. Other postwar Britons also sought personal transformation; they wanted to be “somewhere else.” Some went off to Kathmandu; others merely took drug-induced trips. Even the Beatles, who had outraged Christians in the United States by declaring—correctly—that they were more popular in Britain than Jesus Christ, had spent months with a guru in India. People were beginning to experiment with new ways of being religious. I could not see it at the time, but by asking me to take Jacob to Blackfriars, Jenifer was in tune with this trend. She understood that Jacob needed not a creed, but spirituality and rituals that could bring him a measure of peace. But for me, religion without belief was a contradiction in terms, and I had very little hope that the church, which had brought me to the brink of despair, could help Jacob to make sense of his frightening world. Moon rises!’ ” Jacob greeted me as usual, rushing along the narrow corridor to the kitchen. “ ‘Moon rises at twelve forty-nine a.m.’! Karen! Where are we going this morning?” “We’re going to—” I waited for him to finish the sentence. “Blackfriars!” Jacob roared with evident delight. He certainly seemed enthusiastic. “Do I look smart?” “You’re looking very smart indeed.” He did, too: white jersey, brown cord trousers, and hair brushed and curly. “Now, Jacob, you look at the papers while I make our toast.” “Karen.” He put his head round the door. “You won’t be angry, will you, if I spill coffee all the way down the front of my white jersey?” “Not if it’s an accident, no.” “But if I do it on purpose?” “Then I’ll be very angry indeed.” “Because, Karen, I’m going to do it!” He picked up his mug and regarded me hopefully. “Don’t you dare!” I thundered predictably. “Oh, don’t be severe!”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  When the brakes had cooled, he drove her home. And for several months afterward, whenever John the UPS man delivered a white box and Marian the librarian was at home, he helped her test out the sex toy that it was certain to contain. Without him, too, Marian had large numbers of outdoor-gasms on her ridem mower, helped by several dilda, and when she was done mowing and coming for the afternoon, she often arranged a towel in the sun in the back yard and lay there for an hour or two with her glasses folded near her hand, smelling the smell of cut grass and gasoline and sex juice on her fingers. [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 10AS A PIECE OF ROT THIS WAS, I KNOW, A SMIDGE KEYED-UP in places, but for a first attempt I felt it would do. It was fun to write. But much, much more fun was watching my sunbathing companion read it. I had spent so much time alongside her that I felt she was an old friend, and yet I had no idea how she would react. I stared at her mouth through the binoculars. (She had put on sunglasses.) Every line that she read was a personal triumph for me; every time she moved to the next page I was in absolute heaven. This was a pleasure the likes of which I had not known. Even before she started reading, the sight of her pulling the bag from the sand and undoing the silver twist-tie made my heart swat in all directions,like the Cocoa Puffs rabbit. I wanted her to be holding and reading my home-grown smut so, so much! I so much wanted to have inspired a feeling of quickened curiosity in her. To have done just that—to have created an expression of puzzled curiosity in the universe, where before there had been only a woman lying in a green bathing suit in the sun on the beach, digging in the sand.