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 The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He’d pulled up one trousers leg and caressed his calf and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Then he shook his head as though he had curls instead of a close crop. He wasn’t smiling; he was completely serious. I didn’t know exactly what he meant but I knew he meant something quite precise. “Shut up, Morris,” Tex snapped in a cruelly direct voice and jerked his head to indicate me. I turned just in time to catch it. “And Morris,” he added, “lay off the fuckin’ eye-shadow for chrissake. I’m running a respectable operation here. One more warning you’re out on your little depilated tush.” I looked more closely at Morris. I couldn’t see any trace of makeup. Why would he wear it? I wondered. Do queers like that? Is that how they can tell who’s who? The joy of reading The Outsider had turned ugly. Snow whirled in a sudden updraft, then fell through the streetlights. Day after day the snow fell and the streets rang with the sound of shovels. People in fur hats and many layers of clothing tiptoed awkwardly over gutters piled high with the snow that street plows had turned back. At home I felt a constant tingling excitement just knowing that yesterday afternoon I’d seen Tex and again today I would snatch a few minutes with him. In Evanston, I stood in the bay window and looked out at Lake Michigan beating itself up. Ticking steadily inside me was the thought, half-thrill half-fear, that within my grasp, or almost, lay this other world. This “gay world,” you might say, with its mood swings turning slowly, then slamming you to one side like a roller coaster on a sharp turn. This world with its childlike enthusiasms and vicious attacks. I associated it with Morris’s silent pouting and the way he’d stroked his leg, licked his lips, and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Although I knew something would have to come out of my visits if I continued paying them, I feared what I hoped, and what I hoped I didn’t want to know. Tick, tick, tick. The excitement was in my pulse. I couldn’t think of anything else nor did I want to. I’d look at the mashed potatoes exhaling steam and I’d hear the ticking in my ears. In my bed at night as I peeked through the curtains at the old man across the way reading his paper and luxuriantly picking his nose, I’d hear the tick taking me nearer to my next encounter with Tex. The next afternoon Tex and I were alone in the shop. Morris was home with what Tex sourly referred to as a “sick headache” and Tex kept complaining about Morris’s inept bookkeeping. He was looking through the accounts and a long gray silence installed itself in the room.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The next morning, lightly silvered in hangover sweat, he finally let me plunge into that strong ass, but not before he’d greased me up with KY and produced his “trick towel.” He wouldn’t kiss or let me face him when I took him. But I could reach my hands around his waist and feel the shifting muscles of that long flat stomach working as he twisted and pushed back against me. It dawned on me the stomach scar was there from the time when the doctors must have inserted extra muscles, the long sexy kind—the interior ones gripping me now. I had to say the alphabet backward to keep myself from coming. The moment I looked at what I was doing to him, I could feel myself ready to explode. My come wanted to enter him in order to stake even the smallest claim on someone who seemed superior to me in every way. William Everett Hunton had talked as though the one who does the fucking is the “man,” but with Lou that didn’t make much sense. Obviously he was in control of everything we were doing. It didn’t occur to me that this shockingly intense pleasure could be sought after. If you’re someone mainly eager to please others, you don’t think much about your own pleasure; taking pleasure is not a survival skill, while giving it most certainly is. Lou and I saw each other every day. I stopped going to work, but it didn’t matter, since Lou had lots and lots of loose money in his pockets and he picked up checks without seeming to notice; his carelessness made a mockery of all those hours I’d crouched inside trucks. With a red face I started to explain the lie I’d told the countertenor, but when I confessed the apartment was actually my mother’s, Lou wasn’t interested in either the truth or its distortion. He’d never stopped to wonder how a college kid had his own apartment on the Gold Coast or why it was full of matronly clothes. He was only concerned with realizing his own myths and explaining them to me in order to convince himself. He found anything extreme to be “beautiful” or “moving,” even “heartbreaking,” and his favorite phrase was “shimmering with ambiguity.” He divided all homosexuals into “boys,” “men,” and “vicious old queens.” A man (laborer, truckdriver, even “high-powered exec”) must lust after and love a boy, who would be “beautiful” or at least “cute” but given to sudden enthusiasms, usually reckless and foolish. A man was brawny, cruel, except to the boy, whom he cherished, although sometimes cruelly. The man could be forgiven if he beat someone up, the boy if he bleached his hair. The boy felt a natural affinity to girls, with whom he was always exchanging makeup tips. The man had once fucked girls but now had no further use for them.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Bambara’s text attempted to rectify this need for self-study, but she soon realized the perhaps too-ambitious scope of the book. Among a few of the topics in her twelve-point list were to “set up a comparative study of the woman’s role as she saw it in all the Third World Nations; examine the public school system and blueprint some viable alternatives; explore ourselves and set the record straight on the matriarch and the evil Black bitch; pay tribute to all our warriors from the ancient times to the slave trade to Harriet Tubman to Fannie Lou Hamer to the woman of this morning; interview the migrant workers and the grandmothers of the UNIA; analyze the Freedom Budget and design ways to implement it; thoroughly discuss the whole push for Black Studies programs and a Black university; get into the whole area of sensuality, sex (and is not in original); and finally “chart the steps necessary for forming a working alliance with all nonwhite women of the world for the formation of, among other things, a clearing house for the exchange of information.” As this “list grew and grew,” she came to understand it as a “lifetime of work,” of which the anthology constituted “just a beginning.” 56 In many ways, though, Black women who hoped to fulfill the ambitious intellectual projects she laid out were beginning again. Fannie Barrier Williams, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Victoria Earle Matthews had been calling for racial knowledge production about Black women since 1893. Over three-quarters of a century later, however, Black women still were not seen as experts on their own social condition, and, indeed, if Ebony is to be believed, not capable of any appreciable expertise at all. Bambara’s list of items of study, however, did offer a set of priorities for Black and women-of-color feminisms that have been taken up across a range of disciplines at the present date. The priorities she laid out continue to inform new avenues of study within the broader fields of Black feminism and Black Studies. Black Woman did effectively take up the charge from Pierce’s Ebony article to lay out a “new definition of Black femininity.” So, for instance, in Bambara’s oft-cited essay “On the Issue of Roles,” she faced head-on the question of “the Black woman’s Role in the Revolution,” by questioning both the binary definitions of masculine and feminine and offering up her own structural account of Black gender categories. Calling stereotypical notions of masculine and feminine “a lot of merchandising nonsense,” Bambara argued that gender binaries militated against “what revolution for self is all about— the whole person.” These questions about the relations of gendered identities to revolutionary politics implicated each other, for “the usual notion of sexual differentiation in roles is an obstacle to political consciousness, [because] the way those terms are generally defined and acted upon in this part of the world is a hindrance to full development.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My last year in boarding school during Christmas vacation in Chicago, I met a small Texan with bad eyes, bad skin, and the smell of Luckies on his breath. Tex ran a book and record store next to an art house showing movies near the Loop. “Art movies” were still new then. The label might mean Gina Lollobrigida jiggling provocatively up and down hills on a donkey or it might mean Gérard Philipe meeting an early death as the crazed painter Modigliani. Despite the range, art meant Europe, and something European shed its glow on Tex. I’d get on the elevated train in Evanston and ride an hour each way late in the afternoon just to escape my mother and sister and spend thirty minutes with him. He loved books. I remember running with him down the street one gray winter afternoon when the sun, discouraged by a cold reception, had withdrawn. Tex had nothing on but a tweed jacket and a ratty scarf steeped in smoke, itself the color of smoke. He was racing like a kid to the post office to carry back to the store two boxes of books, all copies of The Outsider by Colin Wilson. I carried one box. Tex had ripped open the other and was juggling with it as he read random pages to me. “Listen to this, will you,” Tex shouted with a sudden reemergence of his warm Southern accent. Generally he tried to sound contained, as though he’d just sucked a lemon, but now his mouth was filling up with hot sweet potato pie. In another instant we were back in Tex’s cozy store, which had been temporarily confided to the care of his pouty assistant, Morris. We settled into a heap on the pink velvet loveseat by the window to read The Outsider to each other in excited snatches. That was the way Tex read, as though a new book were a telegram addressed to him personally. This one was about a whole fortune that a spiritual uncle somewhere off in England had willed him, since the book told us about existentialism and its roots and suggested that, over there at least, to be an outsider was not a cause for shame but a condition that could be capitalized on, even capitalized. Tex talked to me about the Human Condition. Because he didn’t introduce his ideas and he threw away the ends of sentences, he seemed to be letting me in on a conversation I’d be gauche to interrupt and question. The bitter coffee we drank, the sound of the discreetly murmuring announcer on the classical music radio station, and the sight of reflected spotlights tilting off varnished new books and records still in their cellophane wrappers—all of these things came together to excite me, especially since I knew Tex was gay. Morris, the assistant, even used that word when there was no one else in the shop.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvelous phrases as “doubt’s duck with the vermouth lips” or “I have seen a fig eat an onager”—that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was saying: “Find flowers that are chairs” … “my hunger is the black air’s bits” … “his heart, amber and spunk.” Maybe at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying “in eating the sound of moths,” and Apollinaire repeating after him “near a gentleman swallowing himself,” and Breton murmuring softly “night’s pedals move uninterruptedly,” perhaps “in the air beautiful and black” which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable words: “I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that un-earthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening … At present, I think that the best way of writing this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo .” Had I known he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb…. “By being crazy is understood losing one’s reason. Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep silent….” Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across this in French by a Frenchman, O miracle of miracles! “Il faut le dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu’à moitié .” Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash thing—for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: “All things are generated out of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another. Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.” Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, these gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But, over all the other pleasures that be there is that of fair ladies, who, so one but will it, are incontinent brought thither from the four quarters of the world. There might you see the Sovereign Lady of the Rascal-Roughs, the Queen of the Basques, the wife of the Soldan, the Empress of the Usbeg Tartars, the Driggledraggletail of Norroway, the Moll-a-green of Flapdoodleland and the Madkate of Woolgathergreen. But why need I enumerate them to you? There be all the queens in the world, even, I may say, to the Sirreverence of Prester John, who hath his horns amiddleward his arse; see you now? There, after we have drunken and eaten confections and walked a dance or two, each lady betaketh herself to her bedchamber with him at whose instance she hath been brought thither. And you must know that these bedchambers are a very paradise to behold, so goodly they are; ay, and they are no less odoriferous than are the spice-boxes of your shop, whenas you let bray cummin-seed, and therein are beds that would seem to you goodlier than that of the Doge of Venice, and in these they betake themselves to rest. Marry, what a working of the treadles, what a hauling-to of the battens to make the cloth close, these weaveresses keep up, I will e'en leave you to imagine; but of those who fare best, to my seeming, are Buffalmacco and myself, for that he most times letteth come thither the Queen of France for himself, whilst I send for her of England, the which are two of the fairest ladies in the world, and we have known so to do that they have none other eye in their head than us.[400] Wherefore you may judge for yourself if we can and should live and go more merrily than other men, seeing we have the love of two such queens, more by token that, whenas we would have a thousand or two thousand florins of them, we get them not. This, then, we commonly style going a-roving, for that, like as the rovers take every man's good, even so do we, save that we are in this much different from them that they never restore that which they take, whereas we return it again, whenas we have used it. Now, worthy doctor mine, you have heard what it is we call going a-roving; but how strictly this requireth to be kept secret you can see for yourself, and therefore I say no more to you nor pray you thereof.'

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  O fiddledee, O fiddledee, O fiddledum-dum-dee! And now I take leave of that young man sitting alone upstairs in the lugubrious parlor reading the Classics. What a dismal picture! What could he have done with the Classics, had he succeeded in swallowing them? The Classics! Slowly, slowly, I am coming to them—not by reading them, but by making them. Where I join with the ancestors, with my, your, our glorious predecessors, is on the field of the cloth of gold. Bref , daily life… Voltaire, though you are not precisely a classic, you gave me nothing, neither with your Zadig , nor with your Candide . And why pick on that miserable, vinegar-bitten skeleton, Monsieur Arouet? Because it suits me at this moment. I could name twelve hundred different duds and dunderheads who likewise gave me nothing. I could let out a pétarade. To what end? To indicate, to signify, to asseverate and adjudicate that, whether drunk or sober, whether with roller skates or without, whether with bare fists or six-ounce gloves, life comes first. Oui, en terminant ce fatras d’événements de ma pure jeunesse, je pense de nouveau à Cendrars. De la musique avant toute chose! Mais, que donne mieux la musique de la vie que la vie elle-même? The Voice—Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus BoschHere I must interrupt to relate what happened a few minutes ago when I was taking a nap. I say “taking a nap,” but more truthfully I mean—when I was trying to take a nap. In lieu of sleep I got messages. This business has been going on ever since I got the happy thought about the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. This noon it was bad, very bad. I could hardly taste the delicious lunch my wife Eve had prepared for me. As soon as I had finished lunch, I threw a few sticks of wood on the fire, rolled myself up in a blanket and prepared to take my usual snooze before resuming work. (The more snoozes I take the more work I do. It pays off.) I closed my eyes, but the messages kept on coming. When they became too insistent, too clamorous, I would open my eyes and call out, “Eve, jot this down on the pad for me, will you? Just say ‘abundance’ … ‘pilfering’ … ‘Sandy Hook.’” I thought that in tabbing a few key words I could turn off the current. But it didn’t work. Whole sentences poured in on me. Then paragraphs. Then pages…. It’s a phenomenon that always astounds me, no matter how often it happens. Try to bring it about and you fail miserably. Try to squelch it and you become more victimized. Forgive me, but I must go into it further…. The last time it happened was while I was writing Plexus . During the year or so that I was occupied with this work—one of the worst periods, in other respects, that I have ever lived through—the inundation was almost continuous.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The title describes my new-found situation to a T. My creative energy suddenly released, I spilled over in all directions at once. Instead of a book, the first thing I sat down to write was a prose poem about Brooklyn’s backyard. I was so in love with the idea of being a writer that I could scarcely write. The amount of physical energy I possessed was unbelievable. I wore myself out in preparation. It was impossible for me to sit down quietly and just turn on the flow; I was dancing inside. I wanted to describe the world I knew and be in it at the same time. It never occurred to me that with just two or three hours of steady work a day I could write the thickest book imaginable. It was my belief then that if a man sat down to write he should remain glued to his seat for eight or ten hours at a stretch. One ought to write and write until he dropped from exhaustion. That was how I imagined writers went about their task. If only I had known then the program which Cendrars describes in one of his books! Two hours a day, before dawn, and the rest of the day to oneself. What a wealth of books he has given the world, Cendrars! All en marge . Employing a similar procedure—two or three hours a day regularly every day of one’s life—Rémy de Gourmont had demonstrated, as Cendrars points out, that it is possible for a man to read virtually everything of value which has ever been written. But I had no order, no discipline, no set goal. I was completely at the mercy of my impulses, my whims, my desires. My frenzy to live the life of the writer was so great that I overlooked the vast reservoir of material which had accumulated during the years leading up to this moment. I felt impelled to write about the immediate, about what was happening outside my very door. Something fresh , that’s what I was after. To do this was compulsive because, whether I was aware of it or not, the material which I had stored up had been chewed to a frazzle during the years of frustration, doubt and despair when everything I had to say was written out in my head. Add to this that I felt like a boxer or wrestler getting ready for the big event. I needed a work-out. These first efforts then, these fantasies and fantasias, these prose poems and rambling divagations of all sorts, were like a grand tuning up of the instrument. It satisfied my vanity (which was enormous) to set off Roman candles, pin-wheels, sputtering firecrackers. The big cannon crackers I was reserving for the night of the Fourth of July.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  What is the meaning of it all? The air, torn to shreds, rushes by. Everything is flying by, bells, collar buttons, moustachios, pomegranates, hand grenades. We draw aside to make way for you, you fiery steeds. And for you, dear Jascha Heifetz, dear Joseph Szigeti, dear Yehudi Menuhin. We draw aside, humbly—do you hear? No answer. Only the sound of their collar bells. Nights when everything is going whish whoosh! when all the unearthed characters slink out of their hiding places to perform on the rooftop of my brain, arguing, screaming, yodeling, cart-wheeling, whinnying too—what horses!—I know that this is the only life, this life of the writer, and the world may stay put, get worse, sicken and die, all one, because I no longer belong to the world, a world that sickens and dies, that stabs itself over and over, that wobbles like an amputated crab…. I have my own world, a Graben of a world, cluttered with Vespasiennes, Mirós and Heideggers, bidets, a lone Yeshiva Bocher, cantors who sing like clarinets, divas who swim in their own fat, bugle busters and troikas that rush like the wind…. Napoleon has no place here, nor Goethe, nor even those gentie souls with power over birds, such as St. Francis, Milosz the Lithuanian, and Wittgenstein. Even lying on my back, pinned down by dwarves and gremlins, my power is vast and unyielding. My minions obey me; they pop like corn on the griddle, they whirl into line to form sentences, paragraphs, pages. And in some far-off place, in some heavenly day to come, others geared to the music of words will respond to the message and storm heaven itself to spread unbounded delirium. Who knows why these things should be, or why cantatas and oratorios? We know only that their magic is law, and that by observing them, heeding them, reverencing them, we add joy to joy, misery to misery, death to death. Nothing is so creative as creation itself. Abel begot Bogul, and Bogul begot Mogul, and Mogul begot Zobel. Catheter, blatherer, shatterer. One letter added to another makes for a word; one word added to another makes for a phrase; phrase upon phrase, sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph; chapter after chapter, book after book, epic after epic: a Tower of Babel stretching almost, but not quite, to the lips of the Great I Am.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  If at the time we’d been called on to make a comment about this anonymity, we would have said it was “sad” or “pathetic,” but a second later we would have been smiling and feeling that surge of popularity as we walked down Christopher greeting one guy after another, adding another detail to the mental dossier we were compiling on each acquaintance (Oh, Blondy is with Spare Parts—I wonder if Spare Parts is keeping him. No one’s ever figured out till now how Blondy can afford so many new cashmere crewnecks on a dental hygienist’s salary. Oh, and there’s Mike the Barber with his ratpack. I wonder if Mike will say hi to me when he’s with that glam bunch—he did!). On Saturday afternoon while I was working out, a handsome stranger in a bomber jacket came in, walked slowly, arrogantly through the gym and locker room, came right up to me, shook my hand, introduced himself, asked me to pull up my T-shirt, which I stupidly did. He rubbed the back of his hand on my new washboard abs and said, “Nice. You’ll do. Here. Call me.” And he left. And I called the number on his printed trick card and went over, but the good part was just having been chosen like that at the gym. Sean looked sad and I said so. He smiled and stood. He swayed slightly and leaned on my shoulder as he passed me on the way to the window. He climbed out on the fire escape and pissed into the dark. “Did I say something wrong?” I called to him. He stepped back in and said, “It’s just—” “What?” Sean shrugged. “Oh, nothing.” “I’m strong. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  53 of a letter allegedly by Clement of Alexandria, another important church father from near the end of the second century. The letter is a remarkable document. It is allegedly written to an otherwise unknown Theodore. In it, Clement addresses a question Theodore had raised about the existence of a second version of the Gospel of Mark. Clement indicates that Mark had, in fact, produced two versions of his gospel, the one popularly known (that is in our New Testament) and a second more secret one intended only for the spiritual elite. But members of a heretical gnostic sect known as the Carpocratians, notorious for their wild and licentious activities, had gotten hold of this secret version of the gospel and falsi¿ ed it for their own purposes. Clement then goes on to narrate two passages found in Mark’s secret gospel. One is an account of Jesus raising a young man from the dead who then is said to have loved Jesus and come to him later at night “wearing nothing but a linen robe over his nakedness.” Jesus is said to have spent the night with him, teaching him the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The other account is a shorter and more bland account of Jesus refusing to see several women who had come to see him. The questions surrounding the text were numerous and momentous: When was the letter copied into this book of Ignatius? Could it have been a forgery? Did the letter actually go back to Clement of Alexandria? If so, was there really a second version of Mark? And if that was so, was Clement right that it was a secret version? Or could it have been the original version of Mark that got changed because of its possibly offensive overtones? If it did go back to Mark, what does that tell us about the practices and activities of the historical Jesus? Smith was obviously ecstatic about this once-in-a-lifetime discovery. He photographed the relevant pages and spent the next ¿ fteen years of his life analyzing them, getting expert opinions on different aspects of the problem. Companion palaeographers (experts in ancient handwriting) agreed that the letter did, in fact, represent an eighteenth-century style of handwriting. Experts in Clement of Alexandria by and large agreed that the letter

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  A bearded sculptor in his early twenties named Ivan, who dutifully molded and cast big bronze insects, though he far preferred living the life of the artist to making art, had discovered me in the Eton barbershop. The art academy was side by side with the boys’ school, but the students and teachers of the two institutions never mixed, although a few of the poorer artists worked in the Eton kitchen. The barbershop, the kitchen, the Saturday-night movies when everyone sat on folding chairs on the basketball court of the boys’ gymnasium—those were the only places where the two populations might have spoken to each other, though they never did. I did. I spoke to Ivan. I don’t know what I said, but he invited me to his studio. He thought I was precocious for some reason; maybe he just picked up on my eagerness to gnaw off the restraints. Through him I met other painters and sculptors, including Maria. In the long winter afternoons when the skies would turn as cold and silvery as fish scales, I’d sit in the painters’ studios and smell the espresso cooking down in nickel-coated pots on hot plates and try to find in their work what they’d secreted there. At first I’d struggle to see things, guess at what was being masked by all that fudge-thick impasto, that haze of flung drops, but I discovered very quickly how “bourgeois” my interpretations—or any interpretations —seemed to the artists. I also learned to say “painter” not “artist.” I was so eager to please (an extension of the high-school urge to Be Popular) that after only a few hasty observations of how the painters responded to each other’s work, I’d mastered their technique. I, too, would sit on a high wood stool, itself piebald with spattered paint, and look and look without saying a word. That was the trick: say nothing, show nothing. A senile radio would be muttering to itself. The smell of oil paint and turpentine (for acrylics had not yet been introduced) stung my eyes and made my nose run. Windows climbed one wall, floor to ceiling, and through them I could see the silver-lined gray clouds boiling and descending like a deity about to abduct an extremely willing shepherd. I looked and looked at the painting, trying to figure out what was there to be seen. Was it a sort of chess problem to be solved, a visual riddle, or was it a cat’s cradle of tensions (I’d heard someone talking about “push” and “pull”)? Or was I being too “intellectual” (a fault, as I’d gathered)? Should I regard the painting as a spiritual X-ray, a glimpse into the painter’s unconscious ecstasy or agony? Or was it something like a football field on which conflicting teams of thoughts and feelings had skirmished and left this muddy aftermath of the action (for people spoke of “action painting”)? The painters themselves weren’t quite sure, I realize now.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  What is written in the stars, or in my blood, I know nothing of. I know that I spring from the mythological founders of the race. The man who raises the holy bottle to his lips, the criminal who kneels in the market-place, the innocent one who discovers that all corpses stink, the madman who dances with lightning in his hands, the friar who lifts his skirts to pee over the world, the fanatic who ransacks libraries in order to find the Word—all these are fused in me, all these make my confusion, my ecstasy. If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine…. I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one dies of thirst and cold, that “extra-temporal” history, that absolute of time and space where there exists neither man, beast nor vegetation, where one goes crazy with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times. I want a world of men and women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the world as it is!), of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are legends, but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with architecture, religion, plants, animals—rivers that have boats on them and in which men drown, drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the past, but in time and space and history. I want rivers that make oceans such as Shakespeare and Dante, rivers which do not dry up in the void of the past. Oceans, yes! Let us have more oceans, new oceans that blot out the past, oceans that create new geological formations, new topographical vistas and strange, terrifying continents, oceans that destroy and preserve at the same time, oceans that we can sail on, take off to new discoveries, new horizons. Let us have more oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more holocausts. Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts, I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toe-nails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  To do this was compulsive because, whether I was aware of it or not, the material which I had stored up had been chewed to a frazzle during the years of frustration, doubt and despair when everything I had to say was written out in my head. Add to this that I felt like a boxer or wrestler getting ready for the big event. I needed a work-out. These first efforts then, these fantasies and fantasias, these prose poems and rambling divagations of all sorts, were like a grand tuning up of the instrument. It satisfied my vanity (which was enormous) to set off Roman candles, pin-wheels, sputtering firecrackers. The big cannon crackers I was reserving for the night of the Fourth of July. It was morning now, a long, lazy morning of a holiday that was to last forever. I had elected to occupy a choice seat in Paradise. It was definite and certain. I could therefore afford to take my time, could afford to dawdle away the glorious hours ahead of me during which I would still be part of the world and its senseless routine. Once I ascended to the heavenly seat I would join the chorus of angels, the seraphic choir which never ceases to give forth hymns of joy. If I had long been reading the face of the world with the eyes of a writer, I now read it anew with even greater intensity. Nothing was too petty to escape my attention. If I went for a walk—and I was constantly seeking excuses to take a walk, “to explore,” as I put it—it was for the deliberate purpose of transforming myself into an enormous eye. Seeing the common, everyday things in this new light I was often transfixed. The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself. Almost an “unrecognizable” world. The writer waits in ambush for these unique moments. He pounces on his little grain of nothingness like a beast of prey. It is the moment of full awakening, of union and absorption, and it can never be forced. Sometimes one makes the mistake or commits the sin, shall I say, of trying to fix the moment, trying to pin it down in words. It took me ages to understand why, after having made exhaustive efforts to induce these moments of exaltation and release, I should be so incapable of recording them. I never dreamed that it was an end in itself, that to experience a moment of pure bliss, of pure awareness, was the end-all and be-all. Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. “Experience! More experience!” I clamored.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  But as the weeks passed, an unexpected phenomenon occurred: as the group members grew more involved with one another and took more risks, the students grew more and more interested in the drama unfolding before them and the attendance rate sharply increased. Soon they were referring to the group as “Yalom’s Peyton Place” (a takeoff on the name of a TV soap opera in the 1960s). I think of the effect as similar to being engrossed in a well-structured story or novel, and I consider it a propitious sign when therapists are eager to see what will happen next. Even now, after half a century of practice, I generally look forward to each new session, whether individual or group, with anticipation about what new developments will transpire. If that feeling is absent, if I approach a session with little anticipation, I imagine the patient may be experiencing a similar feeling and make an effort to confront and alter that. What effects did student observation have on the patients? That gigantic question worried me a great deal as I noticed how edgy group members were when students were behind the mirror. I tried reassuring patients that student psychiatrists operated under the same confidentiality rules that professional therapists followed, but that was of little help. Then I tried an experiment: I would attempt to turn the annoying presence of observers into something positive. I asked group members and students to switch places for twenty minutes at the end of the meeting. Thus the group members, in the observation room, observed my post-meeting discussion with the students. This step instantly enlivened both the therapy process and the teaching! The therapy group members listened with keen interest to the students’ observations about them, and the students felt like they were under so much scrutiny that they paid sharper attention to their observation of the group. Eventually I added yet another step: the group members had so many feelings about the observers’ commentary and about the observers themselves (whom they often adjudged to be more uptight than group members) that they wanted additional time to discuss their observations of the observers. So I tacked on an additional twenty minutes in which the students went back to the observation room, and the patients and I returned to the group room and discussed the observers’ comments. I realize this is far too time-consuming for everyday practice, but I believe that the format substantially increased the effectiveness of both the therapy group and the teaching. All this was very new. This was a time when I was grateful not to be a member of some traditional school of therapy. I gave myself free rein to create new approaches and had learned enough about outcome research to test my assumptions. Looking back, I surprise myself. Many veteran therapists would feel queasy about others observing their therapy, and yet I felt perfectly comfortable with observation.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE EXISTENTIAL THERAPY E ver since reading Rollo May’s Existence early in my psychiatric residency and taking my first philosophy courses at Hopkins, I had been wondering how I could begin to incorporate the wisdom of the past into my field of psychotherapy. The more philosophy I read, the more I realized how many profound ideas psychiatry had ignored. I much regretted that I had only a rickety foundation in philosophy and the humanities in general, and was determined to begin to address these gaps in my education. I started auditing a number of Stanford undergraduate courses in phenomenology and existentialism, many of them taught by a remarkably lucid thinker and lecturer, Professor Dagfinn Føllesdal. I found the material fascinating, if dense and difficult, and struggled particularly with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. I found Heidegger’s Being and Time opaque, but also intriguing, so much so that I sat through Dagfinn’s Heidegger course twice. He and I were to develop a lifelong friendship. The other Stanford professor teaching courses in my area of interest was Van Harvey, who, despite his staunch agnosticism, was the long-term chair of the Stanford Department of Religious Studies. Sitting in the front row of his classroom, I listened, mesmerized, to his lectures on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, two of the most unforgettable courses I’ve ever taken. Van Harvey, too, became a close friend, and to this day we meet for regular luncheons to talk about philosophy. My whole professional life was changing: less and less did I seek collaboration with scientific projects conducted by members of my department. When psychology professor David Rosenhan went on sabbatical, I stepped in to teach his large undergraduate course on abnormal psychology, but that would be my finale—the last such course I taught. I gradually drifted away from my original affiliation with medical science and began grounding myself in the humanities. This was an exciting time, but also a time of self-doubt: I often felt like an outsider, losing touch with new developments in psychiatry and, at the same time, becoming just a dabbler in philosophy and literature. Gradually I would pick and choose among thinkers who seemed most relevant to my field. I embraced Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Schopenhauer, and Epicurus/Lucretius, and bypassed Kant, Leibniz, Husserl, and Kierkegaard because the clinical application of their ideas was less apparent to me. I also had the good fortune of attending classes given by English professor Albert Guerard, a remarkable literary critic and novelist, and then the honor of co-teaching with him. He and his wife, Maclin—also a writer—became dear friends. In the early 1970s Professor Guerard started a new PhD program in Modern Thought and Literature, and Marilyn and I both served on his board. I began teaching more in the humanities and less in the medical school. Some of the earliest offerings in Modern Thought and Literature included “Psychiatry and Biography,” which I co-taught with Tom Moser, the chair of the Stanford English Department, who also became a good friend.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Our group drew a still larger crowd. The cops hustled half of the bartenders into a squad car and drove off, leaving several policemen behind, barricaded inside the Stonewall with the remaining staff. Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid. I had an urge to be responsible and disperse the crowd peacefully, send everyone home. After all, what were we protesting? Our right to our “pathetic malady”? But in spite of myself a wild exhilaration swept over me, the gleeful counterpart to the rage that had made me choke Simon. Lou was already helping several black men pull up a parking meter. They twisted it until the metal pipe snapped. By accident, the dial cracked open and dimes scattered over the pavement. Everyone laughed and swooped down to snatch up the largesse; the piñata had been struck open at this growing party. Two white, middle-class men in Lacoste shirts came up to me shaking their heads in disapproval. “This could set our cause back for decades,” one of them said. “I’m not against demonstrations, but peaceful ones by responsible people in coats and ties, not these trashy violent drag queens.” I nodded in sober, sorrowing agreement. But a moment later I pushed closer to see what Lou was doing. Someone beside me called out, “Gay is good,” in imitation of the new slogan, “Black is beautiful,” and we all laughed and pressed closer toward the door. The traffic on Christopher had come to a standstill. Lou, a black grease mark on his T-shirt, was standing beside me, holding my hand, chanting, “Gay is good.” We were all chanting it, knowing how ridiculous we were being in this parody of a real demonstration but feeling giddily confident anyway. Now someone said, “We’re the Pink Panthers,” and that made us laugh again. Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis. “This could be the first funny revolution,” Lou said. “Aren’t these guys great, Bunny? Lily Law should never have messed with us on the day Judy died. Look, they’ve turned the parking meter into a battering ram.” The double wooden doors to the Stonewall cracked open. I could hear the cops inside shouting over their walkie-talkies. One of them stepped out with a raised hand to calm the crowd, but everyone booed him and started shoving and he retreated back into Fort Disco. The city trash cans were overflowing with paper cups, greasy napkins, discarded newspapers. A new group of gays rushed up, emptied a can into the splintered-open doorway, doused it with lighter fluid, and lit it. A cloud of black smoke billowed up. “They’ve gone too far,” I said. A black maria came around the corner of Seventh Avenue and up Christopher the wrong way.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  After all, they were students in a provincial school and had nothing to go on beyond occasional visits to New York and perusals of stylishly inscrutable art magazines in which the celebrated genius of the moment intimidated everyone with grim whimsies (“If a bull wants to sit down in my arena, let him!” a gaunt young art widow, herself a painter, had recklessly declared). One of the student painters I met compared his work to jazz and I dutifully looked at his canvases while listening to the newest bop, those cool blue blips and pop-eyed blasts, muted ballads or zany calisthenics. Another guy, a smilingly ironic man who seemed to be Maria’s lover, said, “It’s a dance. I mean, you know, it’s when, you know, the painter moves toward the easel, like, and that is the real painting, you see, kind of like that.” No matter what people said or showed me, I just nodded, wisely. If I did venture an opinion, I replaced my native glibness with a slow groping after simple yet oblique words. Groping was taken as proof of sincerity. But for me the encounter with these men and women and their efforts to explain themselves, with their proud poverty and shared solitude, gave me a view of a bohemian world in which people pursued goals that my father would have despised if he’d ever heard of them. After the stolidity of my childhood—the affluent Midwest of new Cadillacs, Negro maids, and wineless six-o’clock dinners—the sheer effrontery of these painters staying up all night and stretching canvas tight as drumheads, then thumping them with brushes, crayons, charcoal, finally smearing the whole mess away with rags—that thrilled my timid heart. “Common sense” was the name my father and his friends gave their smugness. They worked long hours, saved their money, minded their own business, and furnished their big houses with wall-to-wall carpeting and heavy, store-bought furniture. The sheer weight of their breakfronts and breakfasts, of their wool suits and wooly ideas kept them safely earthbound. But here were these kids, also Midwesterners, who’d left their Wisconsin dairy farms or Indiana milltowns and the chance to take up solid jobs with a future, in order to come here, to puzzle over French novels, listen to Gregorian chants, cut their own hair, work menial jobs, and stab and daub all night at scary, childlike paintings. During that first Michigan winter, I scarcely knew Maria. She crept up on me like the sun, at first just a silvering of the hard pond, a gleam shot through icicles, but at last a patch of blue quarried out of gray cloud. Ivan, the sculptor who’d discovered me, gave me a weird surrealist book to read, The Songs of Maldoror by the Count of Lautréamont. I remember I was most impressed by the biographical note that said the author had been not a count at all but a penniless Uruguayan who’d committed suicide in Paris at the age of twenty-four in 1870.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE WHEN NIETZSCHE WEPT I n 1988, I returned to teaching and clinical work and collaborated with Sophia Vinogradov, a former Stanford psychiatric resident, on A Concise Guide to Group Psychotherapy for the American Psychiatric Press. Soon a familiar discomfort descended upon me: I missed having a literary project to work on and felt adrift. Before long I found myself drawn again to some of Nietzsche’s works. I had always loved reading Nietzsche and soon felt so intoxicated by his powerful language that I couldn’t tug my mind away from this strange nineteenth-century philosopher—a man so brilliant, but so isolated and despairing, and so much in need of help. After spending several months immersed in his early works, it dawned on me that my unconscious had already selected my next project. I now felt split between two desires: to continue my life of research and teaching at Stanford, or to take a plunge and try to write a novel. I recall little of this internal struggle. I only know the solution that finally knit together these two disparate parts: I would write a teaching novel and attempt to transport my students in the field back in time to the Vienna of the late nineteenth century, where they could observe the birth of psychotherapy. Why Nietzsche? Though he had lived during the era when Freud brought psychotherapy into existence, he had never been considered relevant to psychiatry. Yet many of Nietzsche’s pronouncements, sprinkled throughout his work and written before the dawn of psychotherapy, are highly germane to the education of therapists. Consider these: “ Physician help thyself; thus you help your patients too. Let this be his best help—that he, the patient, may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself. ” “ You shall build over and beyond yourself. But first you must be built yourself, perpendicular in body and soul. You shall not only produce yourself, but produce something higher. ” “ For that is what I am through and through: reeling in, raising up, raising, a raiser, cultivator, and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are. ” “ He who has a ‘why’ in life can put up with any ‘how.’ ” “ Often we are more in love with desire than the desired. ” “ Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends. ” I imagined an alternative fictional history in which Nietzsche would play a major role in the evolution of psychotherapy. I imagined him interacting with the familiar cast of characters associated with the birth of psychotherapy: Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer (Freud’s mentor), and Breuer’s patient Anna O. (the first person treated with the psychoanalytic method). How might the face of therapy have been altered, I wondered, if Nietzsche, a philosopher, had played a key role in the birth of our field?

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I felt exhilarated by the presence of so many sophisticated adults: the woman in a black turtleneck examining Either/Or; Morris playing efficient behind the cash register and conspicuously effacing himself like a glamourpuss actress in a nun film; Tex tapping his cigarette in a Ricard ashtray, his fear of bankruptcy temporarily pushed aside; and this successful New York heterosexual who might tolerate me in his bed. Tex introduced us. The man’s first name was Lester and the last something Russian that ended in “iak.” He wore horn-rims that he kept taking off as he spoke or examined a book, as though they served no function other than rhetorical. He wore a shaggy coat as a metonym for the hair I felt certain must cover his entire body. He had the bulging forehead, shaggy brows, and strong jaw of Beethoven in the hand-size, chalky busts that my childhood piano teacher, Herr Pogner, doled out to students as prizes.