Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Let me reiterate. Generally, an animal in the wild, if not killed, recovers from its immobility and lives to see another day. It is wiser but none the worse for wear. For example, a deer learns to avoid a certain rock outcropping where it was ambushed by a mountain lion. While my observational hypothesis is based on field observations and is not empirically proven, my interviews with wildlife managers throughout the world have supported it. In addition, it is difficult to imagine how individual wild animals (or their entire species, for that matter) would have ever survived if they routinely developed the sorts of debilitating symptoms that many humans do.b This natural “immunity” is clearly not the case for us modern humans … but why and what can we do about it? Long-Lasting ImmobilityAs I was completing my doctoral dissertation at Berkeley in 1977, I continued with my daily visits to the musty stacks of the graduate library, where I stumbled upon the critical key in my understanding of trauma. This article by Gordon Gallup and Jack D. Maser informed the central question of how the normally time-limited immobility response becomes long-lasting and eventually unending.26 For their work, I would like to make a personal nomination for them to retroactively receive the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—along with the three ethologists previously mentioned. In a carefully thought-out and well-controlled experiment, the authors demonstrated that if an animal is both frightened and restrained, the period during which it remains immobilized (after the restraint is removed) is dramatically increased. There is a nearly perfect linear correlation between the level of fear an animal experiences when it is restrained, and the duration of immobility.27 When an animal is not subjected to fear before being restrained, immobility generally lasts from seconds to about a minute. This spontaneous capacity is called “self-paced termination.”28 In dramatic contrast, when both repeatedly frightened and repeatedly restrained, the experimental animal may remain immobilized for as long as seventeen hours! It is my clinical experience and understanding that such a robust potentiation has profound clinical implications for the understanding and treatment of human trauma. I shall discuss how the “potentiation,” or enhancement, of immobility by fear can lead to a self-perpetuating feedback loop causing an essentially permanent quasi-paralysis in the traumatized individual. This condition, I believe, underpins several of trauma’s most debilitating symptoms, especially numbing, shutdown, dissociation, feelings of entrapment and helplessness. A few years ago, in Brazil, I had the opportunity to observe the interaction between fear and immobility within a laboratory setting and thereby gained direct verification of the seminal work of Gallup and Maser on tonic immobility. Although there are very few researchers in this important field, I found one actively involved in experimental animal research on tonic immobility at the laboratory of Leda Menescal de Oliveira at the Federal University, School of Medicine in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil. Her work has focused on the brain pathways activated in tonic immobility.29

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Now that he was home, he understood, he must still be vigilant. Memories would creep up on him, emotions sabotaging his thinking brain. To come alive after dying to himself was dangerous. There was far too much to feel, so he must seek, he thought, only shallow sensations. We also learn that, “as a child, Fidelis had breathed lightly and gone motionless … whenever as a child sorrow had come down upon him.” As a young soldier, “he’d known from the first that in his talent for stillness lay the key to his survival.” The human need to gradually return from the land of the walking dead to the land of the living needs to be understood, respected and honored. Too much, too soon, threatens to overwhelm the fragile ego structure and adaptive personality. This is why the rate at which people resolve trauma must be gradual and “titrated.” Instinct and ReasonIn the final analysis, I believe that it is the dynamic balance between the most primitive and the most evolved/refined parts of the brain that allows trauma to be resolved and difficult emotions to be integrated and transformed. Effective treatment is a matter of helping individuals keep the “observing” prefrontal cortex online as it simultaneously experiences the raw primitive sensations generated in the archaic portions of the brain (the limbic system, hypothalamus and brain stem; see Figure 4.2). The key to this delicate undertaking is being able to safely sense both intense and subtle body sensations and feelings. It turns out that there is a paired brain structure that appears to do exactly that: wedged in between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex are the insula (nearer to the limbic system) and cingulate (nearer to the cortex). Briefly, the insula receives input from the internal structures of the body, including muscles, joints and viscera. Together, insula and cingulate help us make sense of these primitive sensations by weaving them into nuanced feelings, perceptions and cognitions.52 Accessing that function is a key to the approach of transforming trauma and difficult emotions described in the following chapters. Balancing Instinct and Reason [image file=image_rsrc2N7.jpg] Figure 4.2 This illustrates the importance of keeping the prefrontal cortex online during activation of survival-based arousal in the brain stem and limbic system. Note how nerve impulses flow between the instinctual brain structures of the thalamus and hypothalamus (which controls the secretion of the pituitary gland that is vital for maintaining organ and cellular homeostasis) and the frontal lobe (or rational brain). Restoring the balance and rhythm between instinct and reason also plays a central part in healing the mind/body split. Integration of brain and body, of right and left cerebral hemispheres, and of primitive and evolved brain regions promotes wholeness and makes us fully human. Until then, we are, as Margaret Mead noted, “the missing link between apes and humans.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid. Dream House as WarningA few months before your girlfriend became the Woman in the Dream House, a young, upper-class, petite, blonde undergrad named Lauren Spierer went missing in Bloomington. The parents of the woman in the Dream House were apoplectic; she was not an undergrad but she was young and upper class and petite and blonde and thus a potential target for whatever monster spirited Lauren off this earth. (Years later, you learned that another girl went missing at the same time. Unlike Lauren, she did not come from a wealthy family. Her name was Crystal Grubb. The family struggled to get other people to care; eventually, they found her strangled in a cornfield. It is not an extraordinary thing to claim that some people are more valuable than others to the world.) You were both acutely aware of Lauren’s nonpresence in those first few months. Massive signs were hung and erected all over town; in them, her face was tilted, her sunglasses perched in her hair. Every time you went out, you thought about Lauren, last seen with no shoes, walking down the street on that humid June night. Where was she going? What was she walking away from? Dream House as AppetiteYou make a mistake early on, though you don’t know it at the time. You admit to her that you are constantly nursing low-grade crushes on many people in your life. Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart, funny minds, and the result is a gooey, lovely space somewhere between philia and eros. You’ve been this way as long as you can remember. You’ve always found this quirk of your personality to be just that, a quirk, and she laughs and says she’s charmed by it. Over the course of your relationship, she will accuse you of fucking, or wanting to fuck, or planning to fuck, the following people: your roommate, your roommate’s girlfriend, dozens of your friends, the Clarion class you haven’t even met yet, a dozen of her friends, not a few of her colleagues at Indiana, her ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, your ex-boyfriends, several of your teachers, the director of your MFA program, several of your students, one of your doctors, and—in perhaps the most demented moment of this exercise—her father. Also, an untold litany of strangers: people on the subway and in coffee shops, waiters at restaurants, store clerks and grocery store cashiers and librarians and ticket takers and janitors and museumgoers and beach sleepers.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  A woman’s sanity is undercut by her conniving husband, who misplaces objects—a brooch, a painting, a letter—in an attempt to make her believe she is mad so that he ultimately can send her to an asylum. Eventually his plan is revealed: he had murdered her aunt when the woman was a child and orchestrated their whirlwind romance years later in order to return to the house to locate some missing jewels. Nightly, Gregory—played by a silky, charismatic Charles Boyer—ventures into their attic, unbeknownst to her, to search for them. The eponymous gaslights are one of the many reasons the heroine believes herself to be truly going mad—they dim as if the gas has been turned on elsewhere in the house, even when, it would seem, no one has done so. Bergman’s Paula is in a terrible, double-edged tumble: as she becomes convinced she is forgetful, fragile, then insane, her instability increases. Everything she is, is unmade by psychological violence: she is radiant, then hysterical, then utterly haunted. By the end she is a mere husk, floating around her opulent London residence like a specter. He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison. Watching the film, you feel for Paula, even though she is not real: her suffering is captured in celluloid’s carbonite. You watch it over and over again in the dark: admiring the eerie shots of their respective shadows against the fanciful Victorian furniture and decor, pausing over her defeated expressions, her swooning, her dewy, trembling mouth. Ingrid Bergman is a mountain of a woman, tall and robust, but in this movie she is worn down like a sand dune. Gregory makes her break down in public, during a concert; later, he does so in their home, with only their two maids as witnesses. No audience is too small for her debasement. “Don’t humiliate me in front of the servants,” Paula sobs. But even if they hadn’t come in and seen what they’d seen, we would have. She might as well have said, “Don’t humiliate me in front of the audience.” Because either way, we—servants, viewers—are witnesses without power. People who have never seen Gaslight, or who have only read secondhand descriptions of it, often say that Gregory’s entire purpose—the reason he “makes the lamps flicker”—is to drive Paula mad, as though that is the sum of his desires. This is probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of the story. In fact, Gregory has an extremely comprehensible motivation for his actions—the need to search for the jewels unimpeded by Paula’s presence. The flickering gas lamps are a side effect of that pursuit, and even his deliberate madness-inducing machinations are directed to this very sensible end. And yet, there is an unmistakable air of enjoyment behind his manipulation. You can plainly see the microexpressions flit across his face as he improvises, torments, schemes. He enjoys it and it serves him, and he is twice satisfied.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The rain slows, then stops, and you enter Indiana. In the final stretch, when she exits the main highway and takes a two-lane country road south to Bloomington, the car begins to yawn to the left, kissing the double line, surpassing it, and then to the right, where the door passes within inches of a metal barrier. When you look over, the back of her skull is touching the headrest, her eyes closed. You bark her name, and the car rights itself. “Now you’re too tired,” you say. “You’re falling asleep. Please, let me do this final stretch. We’re almost there.” You have never been so awake. “I’m fine,” she says. “My body is my bitch. I can make it do whatever I want.” “Please, please pull over.” She curls her lip, but doesn’t say anything else and doesn’t stop. Every so often, the car swerves drunkenly. You pass a religious billboard that asks you if you know where you’d go after death. In full daylight, this sort of manipulative propaganda would make you roll your eyes. But now, it tugs on an old childhood fear, and you whimper and then try, too late, to swallow the sound. When you first came to Bloomington—when you helped her find the Dream House—it was impossibly bright. It was late spring, and the trees were electric, new-growth neon green. Now the leaves burn in red and orange, and brown ones spiral away from the branches. The season is dying and you are going to die too, you are certain, this night. The car pulls into the driveway around four in the morning and sits there in silence. You feel like you are going to throw up. The leaves drop onto the car’s roof and the wind snatches them away with a papery scrape. Finally she reaches to unbuckle her seat belt, but you are watching the lawn. Two dark shapes are crossing it, like dogs, but not. Coyotes? It would have been a lovely sight at any time, but in contrast to this night’s terrors it is so beautiful your face tingles. “Look,” you say softly, pointing. She starts as if you’ve struck her. Then she sees what you see. You wait for her coo, for her sweetness. “Fuck you,” she says. She leans toward you and speaks directly into your ear. “You say ‘look’ without saying anything else, I think you’re fucking pointing out someone who’s going to fucking kill us. It’s the middle of the night. What the fuck is wrong with you?” She kicks open the car door; the coyotes bolt for the trees. You watch her stomp through the Dream House. Her silhouette is thrown up against a series of illuminated windows—kitchen, bathroom, bedroom—and then all the lights go out.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  He leaps into action, attaches his computer to the elaborate speaker system he’s set up in your house, and begins to play some sort of chaotic noise metal. He runs around like Mickey from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” adding his own energy to the noise. “Resist, Carmen, resist!” he cries, slapping the counter with his hands and hitting pans with wooden spoons and amping up the music as loud as it will go. (In Angel Street, when the police sergeant finally makes contact with the tormented, gaslit wife, he tells her firmly, “You are up against the most awful moment in your life, and your whole future depends on what you are going to do in the next hour. Nothing less. You have got to strike for your freedom, and strike now, for the moment may not come again.”) You feel suddenly infused with the discordance, and yell “fuck you” at the phone (which has done nothing but its precise function!) before attempting to figure out how to block her number. You end up googling it, and once it’s done, the phone goes silent. But the voicemails are there, and you ask John to turn down the music. Each one is a little different. Some are steeped in sorrow: I love you, I miss you. Others are threatening. You fucking cunt, pick up this phone right now. (As if she has forgotten you own a cell phone and not a landline, and you are not standing still in the kitchen listening to her voice on an answering machine while she’s leaving her message.) You are so deeply freaked out by this seemingly unhinged sequence, like a bad and offensive movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder, that you try to imagine her leaving the messages—where she might be in the Dream House. You imagine her threatening you in the bedroom, weeping for you in the living room, pledging her undying love in the office. You think it will make you feel better, but it makes you feel worse. You save the voicemails, in case you need to get a restraining order. When you upgrade your phone a few months later, they are lost. Dream House as DenouementYou have planned a chat with Val between an end-of-semester barbecue and a house party. You leave the former later than you intend, so when Val calls, you pull over on a shady street. It is so strange to hear her voice, soft and sweet over the phone. You chatter nervously at each other for a few minutes before arriving at a mush of apologies and tears. “I can’t believe you agreed to be in an open relationship,” you say to her. “She cared about you,” she says. “I didn’t think I had a choice.” “Before that.” “What do you mean?” “When I met her, she was in an open relationship.” The silence on the end of the line is long and slow. “What are you talking about?” she asks.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 39. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types T511.1.3, Conception from eating mango; T511.1.5, Conception from eating lemon; T511.2.1, Conception from eating mandrake; T511.2.2, Conception from eating watercress; T511.3.1, Conception from eating peppercorn; T511.3.2, Conception from eating spinach; T511.4.1, Conception from eating rose; T511.5.2, Conception from swallowing worm (in drink of water); T511.5.3, Conception from eating louse; T511.6.1, Conception from eating woman’s heart; T511.6.2, Conception from eating finger-bones; T511.7.1, Conception after eating honey given by lover; T511.8.6, Conception from swallowing a pearl; T512.4, Conception from drinking saint’s tears; T512.7, Conception from drinking dew; T513.1, Conception through another’s wish; T514, Conception after reciprocal desire for each other; T515.1, Impregnation through lustful glance; T516, Conception through dream; T517, Conception from extraordinary intercourse; T521, Conception from sunlight; T521.1, Conception from moonlight; T521.2, Conception from rainbow; T522, Conception from falling rain; T523, Conception from bathing; T524, Conception from wind; T525, Conception from falling star; T525.2, Impregnation by a comet; T528, Impregnation by thunder (lightning); T532.1.3, Impregnation by leaf of lettuce; T532.1.4, Conception by smell of cooked dragon heart; T532.1.4.1, Conception after smelling ground bone-dust; T532.2, Conception from stepping on an animal; T532.3, Conception from fruit thrown against breast; T532.5, Conception from putting on another’s girdle; T532.10, Conception from hiss of cobra; T533, Conception from spittle; T534, Conception from blood; T535, Conception from fire; T536, Conception from feathers falling on woman; T539.2, Conception by a cry.Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to. When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly. “You were moving all night,” she says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake.” If you apologize profusely, go to this page. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to this page. If you tell her to calm down, go to this page. “I’m so sorry,” you tell her. “I really didn’t mean to. I just move my arms around a lot in my sleep.” You try to be light about it. “Did you know my dad does the same thing, the sleeping damsel swoon? So weird. I must have—” “Are you really sorry?” she says. “I don’t think you are.” “I am,” you say. You want the first impression of the morning to return to you; its freshness, its light. “I really am.” “Prove it.” “How?” “Stop doing it.” “I told you, I can’t.” “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her all the way to the kitchen. Go to this page.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Undead I think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.” Dream House as Sanctuary The night she chased me in the Dream House and I locked myself in the bathroom, I remember sitting with my back against the wall, pleading with the universe that she wouldn’t have the tools or know-how to take the doorknob out of the door. Her technical incompetence was my luck, and my luck was that I could sit there, watching the door test its hinges with every blow. I could sit there on the floor and cry and say anything I liked because in that moment it was my own little space, even though after that it would never be mine again. For the rest of my time in the Dream House, my body would charge with alarm every time I stepped into that bathroom; but in that moment, I was the closest thing I could be to safe. When Debra Reid was eventually released on parole, she had to stay in prison longer than she needed to because securing housing was a condition of her release and she was having difficulty doing so. She told an interviewer, “I just want to get an apartment and turn my own little doorknob and use my own bathroom and eat my own food.” I can’t get Debra or her doorknob out of my mind. I hope she got what she needed.

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

  No shame or embarrassment. No apologizing for who they are. No covering up or pretending. No masks or secrets. Total acceptance of each other. That’s what we want, isn’t it? We want someone to see us exactly as we are and still love us. It’s terrifying to let people see who we really are. To see the darkness in our hearts, our bad habits, all of the things we’ve done in the past that we regret. Our biases, our shortcomings, the things we aren’t good at. Being naked is terrifying. What would it be like to be with someone who loves you exactly as you are? If you see me for who I really am, the me that no one else has ever seen, the me that I wouldn’t dare to show anybody else on the planet, the parts of me I’m not sure I want anybody ever to see, if I give you that kind of glimpse into the seat of my being, into my soul, will you still love me like you do now? It’s our question for each other, and it’s our question for God. Unconditional, absolute acceptance. From a lover, from God—it’s what we crave. This is why a marriage is always about something bigger than itself. It’s two people, in their unconditionally loving embrace of each other, showing each other in flesh and blood what God is like. These two are naked, and they feel no shame. Out of Order There’s a progression here, a pattern in this passage for how we’re made to connect with another. It’s built into the fabric of creation. There’s a way for souls to mingle. And it’s possible to get this progression out of order. We have to understand that we were created by God to live as integrated beings. Whole. One. Not splintered and fractured but one. In the Psalms, it’s written that “fools say in their hearts . . .” It’s written in another psalm, “My spirit asked . . .” In another, “My heart and my flesh cry out . . .”15 Hearts speak and spirits ask and flesh cries out. The body and the soul and the brain and the heart and thoughts and feelings are all merged into one being we call a person. The passage in Genesis about Adam and Eve is about whole persons coming together. All of him being given to all of her. All of her being given to all of him. If he wants her just for her body, that splits her. It means that she is good to him only for a part of her. That’s why when she’s slept with him, she wants to know where the relationship is headed. She wants to be integrated. She craves it. She wants to know that he will be there in the morning, and the next morning, and the next morning. She wants to know that beyond the sex, he loves her, he wants her—all of her.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Although a newlywed for less than nine months, his wife María had already given birth to his first child, a healthy boy. On this particular night, José was scared. He ran through the sleeping town, silently making his way toward his makeshift home, praying and hoping that he wasn't too late. He had to save his family from certain death! He burst into his shack and went straight to the sleeping mats on the dirt floor. “Despierta mi amor , wake up my love,” José told his wife as he gently shook her. “A messenger just warned me that la milicia , the militia, will be coming for us. I fear we will disappear! Apúrate , hurry up, we must leave this moment for a safer land, far from the reaches of this brutal dictatorship.” There was no time to pack any belongings or personal mementoes, nor was there time to say goodbye to friends and family. In the middle of the night, literally a few steps before the National Guard, José took his small family into el exilio , exile. They would come to a foreign country, wearing only the clothes on their backs. Even though they could not speak the language nor understand the strange customs and idiosyncracies of the dominant culture, at least they were physically safe. Salvation for this poor family was found south of the border. Over two thousand years ago this family arrived in Egypt as political refugees, fleeing the tyrannical regime of Herod. Over forty years ago my own father came home to his wife, my mother, with similar news. Because of his involvement with the former political regime, he was now a fugitive of the newly installed government. If caught, he would face certain death. They gathered me, their six-month-old son, and headed north, arriving in this country literally with only the clothes on their backs. Like Jesus, I too was a political refugee, a victim of circumstances beyond my comprehension or control. My Jesus knows my pain of being a foreigner in an alien land. Jesus understands what it means to be seen as inferior because he too was from a culture different from the dominant one. I have no doubt that Jesus wept as a child for the same reasons I did. For me to see Jesus as a refugee is more than to locate my story in the biblical narrative. Rather, the story of Jesus becomes my story as I move from my social location to the biblical text. In short, I discover a Savior who knows the fears and frustrations of a small alien boy because Jesus also experienced those same fears and frustrations. Latino/as, even though they have lived for hundreds of years on the land that would eventually become the United States, are still seen as aliens, exiles, and outsiders—people who are marginalized because they are perceived as not belonging.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Most Native Americans, for example, have a very special, spiritual, mythic relationship with the eagle. Is this a coincidence, or is there something imprinted deeply within the structures of the brain, body and soul of the human species that responds intrinsically to the image of eagle with a correlative excitement and awe? Most organisms possess dispositions, if not specific approach/avoidance responses, to large moving contours. * If the initial shadow had been from a raging grizzly bear (rather than from a rising eagle), a very different reaction would have been evoked: the preparation to flee. This is not, as James discovered, because we think “bear,” evaluate it as dangerous and then run. It is because the contours and features of the large, looming, approaching animal cast a particular light pattern upon the retina of the eye. This stimulates a configuration of neural firing that is registered in the phylogenetically primitive brain regions. This “pattern recognition” triggers, in turn, the preparation for defensive responding before it is registered in consciousness. † These unconscious responses derive from genetic predispositions (as well as from the outcomes of previous personal experiences with similar large animals). Primitive, nonconscious circuits are activated, triggering preset constellations or tendencies of defensive posturing. Muscles, viscera and autonomic nervous system activity cooperate in preparing for escape. This preparation is sensed kinesthetically and is internally joined, as a gestalt, to the image of the bear. Preparation for defensive movement and image are fused and registered together as the feeling of danger. Motivated by this feeling and not by fear, we continue to scan for more information (a grove of trees, some rocks) while at the same time drawing on our ancestral and personal memory banks. Probabilities are nonconsciously computed, based on such encounters over millions of years of species evolution, as well as on what we have learned individually does or does not work. We prepare for the next phase in this unfolding drama. Without thinking, we orient toward a large tree with low branches. An urge is experienced to flee and climb. If we run, freely oriented toward the tree, we have the feeling of directed running. The urge to run (experienced as the feeling of danger) is followed by successful running (experienced as escape rather than fear or anxiety). On the other hand, let us consider a situation where escape is impossible—where you are trapped. This time you chance upon a starved or wounded bear standing in the path and blocking your escape (as in walking out of a steep box canyon). In this case, the defensive preparedness for flight, concomitant with the feeling of danger, is thwarted. The feeling of danger will then abruptly change into the emotional state of fear. Response is now restricted to non-directed, desperate flight, to rage-counterattack or to freeze-collapse. The latter affords the possibility of diminishing the bear’s urge to attack.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “But I’ve told you that I believe you. I didn’t ask you about Minos Korva. I asked how many lights you see.” Picard squints upward. “There are four lights.” Gul Madred sighs like a disappointed parent. “I don’t understand how you can be so mistaken.” Picard squints against them and says, “What lights?” He spasms so hard his body leaps from the chair, strikes the floor. Lying on the floor, Picard mumble-sings a French folk song from his childhood. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.” On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing. “Where were you?” Madred asks. “At home. Sunday dinner. We would all sing afterward.” Madred opens the door and tells Picard he may go. But as Picard prepares to leave, Madred tells him he’ll torture Dr. Crusher instead. Picard returns to his chair. “Are you choosing to stay with me?” Madred asks. Picard is silent. “Excellent,” Madred says. “I can’t tell you how pleased this makes me.” Later, Madred feeds Picard. Boiled taspar egg, “a delicacy,” he says. When cracked open, it is an undulating, gelatinous mass with an eye at its center. Picard sucks the contents from the shell. Madred has his own meal; shares a story of his own childhood as a street urchin in Lakat, on the Cardassian homeworld. “In spite of all you have done to me,” Picard says with clarity, “I find you a pitiable man.” Madred’s cordial attitude vanishes. “What are the Federation’s defense plans for Minos Korva?” he shouts. “There are four lights!” Picard says. Gul Madred turns on the device, and Picard begins writhing. “How many do you see now?” Picard screams, weeps, sings. On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing. [image file=image_rsrc2K1.jpg] Back on the Enterprise, the crew has negotiated Picard’s release. In the final scene between Picard and Madred, Picard grabs the device that controls the pain, smashes it against a table. Madred calmly tells him it doesn’t matter; he has many more. “Still,” Picard says, “it felt good.” “Enjoy your good feelings while you can. There may not be many more of them.” Madred goes on to explain that a battle has commenced, and the Enterprise is “burning in space.” Everyone will assume you’ve died with them, Madred says, and so you will stay here forever. “You do, however, have a choice. You can live out your life in misery, held here, subject to my whims. Or you can live in comfort with good food and warm clothing, women as you desire them, allowed to pursue your study of philosophy and history. I would enjoy debating with you; you have a keen mind. It’s up to you. A life of ease, of reflection and intellectual challenge. Or this.” “What must I do?” Picard says. “Nothing, really,” Madred says. He glances upward, like he’s looking for rain before stepping out from under an awning. “Tell me … how many lights do you see?”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Mystical Pregnancy Every television show you watched in your twenties included some kind of mystical pregnancy. Every interesting female character needs one, or so the showrunners seem to think. Vampires get pregnant with magical mortals; comatose women give birth to gods and empathic starfleet officers to mystic energy; time-traveling companions discover they’ve been flesh avatars for months, and their actual body is somewhere far away and about to give birth. One woman wakes up on her wedding day to discover herself massively pregnant, courtesy of an alien. You are thinking of these episodes when you begin to experience pregnancy symptoms in the Dream House. You vomit into the toilet, you feel swollen and out of sorts. The two of you have talked about a child for so long—a little girl, Clementine, hair poufy like a Q-Tip, like hers—that you abandon all reason and wonder if you could be pregnant. You have had so much sex, and the intensity between you feels as real as anything. You consider saying to her, “Ha! I’m sick like I’m pregnant, isn’t that weird?” But you are terrified—of the radical body modification that is pregnancy, the dangers of childbirth, the unforgiving nature of motherhood, and—most importantly—of what she’ll accuse you of. What she’ll do afterward. You drink ginger ale, you lie down for a long time, you forgo food for an evening under the pretense of having snacked, which you definitely did not do. You cannot be pregnant, you cannot be pregnant, you literally absolutely could not be pregnant under any circumstances. 39 You take a pregnancy test anyway, like an idiot, and of course it’s negative because you haven’t had a penis anywhere near your body in years. You are afraid she’ll find the test, so you put it in a Ziploc bag and throw it out in someone’s trash can on the street after she’s gone to class. 39 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Types T511.1.3, Conception from eating mango; T511.1.5, Conception from eating lemon; T511.2.1, Conception from eating mandrake; T511.2.2, Conception from eating watercress; T511.3.1, Conception from eating peppercorn; T511.3.2, Conception from eating spinach; T511.4.1, Conception from eating rose; T511.5.2, Conception from swallowing worm (in drink of water); T511.5.3, Conception from eating louse; T511.6.1, Conception from eating woman’s heart; T511.6.2, Conception from eating finger-bones; T511.7.1, Conception after eating honey given by lover; T511.8.6, Conception from swallowing a pearl; T512.4, Conception from drinking saint’s tears; T512.7, Conception from drinking dew; T513.1, Conception through another’s wish; T514, Conception after reciprocal desire for each other; T515.1, Impregnation through lustful glance; T516, Conception through dream; T517, Conception from extraordinary intercourse; T521, Conception from sunlight; T521.1, Conception from moonlight; T521.2, Conception from rainbow; T522, Conception from falling rain; T523, Conception from bathing; T524, Conception from wind; T525, Conception from falling star; T525.2, Impregnation by a comet; T528, Impregnation by thunder (lightning); T532.1.3, Impregnation by leaf of lettuce; T532.1.4, Conception by smell of cooked dragon heart; T532.1.4.1, Conception after smelling ground bone-dust; T532.2, Conception from stepping on an animal; T532.3, Conception from fruit thrown against breast; T532.5, Conception from putting on another’s girdle; T532.10, Conception from hiss of cobra; T533, Conception from spittle; T534, Conception from blood; T535, Conception from fire; T536, Conception from feathers falling on woman; T539.2, Conception by a cry.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Watergate, however, kept coming back to life and would not leave him alone. In January 1973, the Senate decided to launch an investigation. In March, McCord finally spilled the beans, implicating various members of the White House staff in the ordering of the break-in. Hunt began demanding hush money to not reveal what he knew. The way out of this mess was simple and clear—hire an outside lawyer to do an internal investigation of the break-in, with the full cooperation of Nixon and his team, and bring all the details to light. Nixon’s reputation would suffer, some would go to prison, but it would keep him politically alive, and he was the master of coming back from the dead. Nixon, however, could not take such a step. There would be too much immediate damage. The thought of coming clean about what he knew and had ordered frightened him to death. In meetings with Dean he continued to discuss the cover-up, even suggesting where they could come up with hush money. Dean cautioned him to not get so involved, but Nixon seemed oddly fascinated by the growing mess he had created, and unable to pull himself away. Soon he was forced to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman, both of whom had been deeply implicated in the break-in. It was an ordeal to get him to personally fire them, and when it came to delivering the news to Ehrlichman, he broke down and sobbed. But it seemed that nothing he did could stop the momentum of the Watergate investigation, which got closer and closer to Nixon, making him feel like a trapped rat. On July 19, 1973, he received the worst news of all: the Senate committee investigating Watergate had learned of the secret taping system installed in the White House, and they demanded that the tapes be handed over to them as evidence. All Nixon could think about was the intense embarrassment that would ensue if the tapes went public. They would make him the laughingstock of the world. Think of the language that he had used and the many harsh things he had advocated. His image, his legacy, all the ideals he had striven to realize, it would all be ruined in one fell stroke. He thought of his mother and his own family—they had never heard him speak as he had done in the privacy of his own office. It was as if he were another person on those tapes. Alexander Haig, who was now his chief of staff, told Nixon he had to tear out the taping system and destroy the tapes immediately, before receiving an official subpoena. Nixon seemed paralyzed: Destroying the tapes would be an admission of guilt; perhaps the tapes would exonerate him, as they would prove he had never directly ordered the break-in. But the thought of any of these tapes becoming public terrified him.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  A sound now of dribbling. A liquid warmth slides down the hem of her black trousers. The acrid smell of ammonia. Lan pisses herself in front of the two boys—and holds the girl tighter. Around her feet a circle of wet heat. The brain of the macaque monkey is the closest, of any mammal, to a human’s. The raindrops darken as they slide down the blond soldier’s dirt-baked cheeks before collecting, like ellipses, along his jaw. — “Yoo Et Aye numbuh won,” she says, urine still dripping down her ankles. Then again, louder. “Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. “No bang bang.” She raises her free hand to the sky, as if to let someone pull her right up to it. “No bang bang. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won.” A tic in the boy’s left eye. A green leaf falling into a green pond. He stares at the girl, her too-pink skin. The girl whose name is Hong, or Rose. Because why not another flower? Hong—a syllable the mouth must swallow whole at once. Lily and Rose, side by side on this breath-white road. A mother holding a daughter. A rose growing out of the stem of a lily. He takes note of Rose’s hair, its errant cinnamon tint fringed blond around the temples. Seeing the soldier’s eyes on her daughter, Lan pushes the girl’s face to her chest, shielding her. The boy watches this child, the whiteness showing from her yellow body. He could be her father, he thinks, realizes. Someone he knows could be her father—his sergeant, squad leader, platoon partner, Michael, George, Thomas, Raymond, Jackson. He considers them, rifle gripped tight, his eyes on the girl with American blood before the American gun. “No bang bang . . . Yoo Et Aye . . . ,” Lan whispers now. “Yoo Et Aye . . .” Macaques are capable of self-doubt and introspection, traits once thought attributable only to humans. Some species have displayed behavior indicating the use of judgment, creativity, even language. They are able to recall past images and apply them to current problem solving. In other words, macaques employ memory in order to survive. — The men will eat until the animal is empty, the monkey slowing as they spoon, its limbs heavy and listless. When nothing’s left, when all of its memories dissolve into the men’s bloodstreams, the monkey dies. Another bottle will be opened. Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. Hands up. Don’t shoot. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. Hands up. No bang bang.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  When the door opens, the men put down their glasses, some after quickly draining the dregs. A macaque monkey, the size of a dog, is led, with collar and leash, by a stooped man with combed white hair. No one speaks. All ten eyes are on the mammal as it staggers into the room, its burnt-red hair reeking of alcohol and feces, having been force-fed vodka and morphine in its cage all morning. The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having. A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black? The force of the soldier’s voice pushes the woman back. She wavers, one arm flailing, then steadies, pressing the girl into her. A mother and a daughter. A me and a you. It’s an old story. The stooped man leads the monkey under the table, guides its head through a hole cut in the center. Another bottle is opened. The twist cap clicks as the men reach for their glasses. The monkey is tied to a beam under the table. It jostles about. With its mouth muffled behind a leather strap, its screams sound more like the reel of a fishing rod cast far across a pond. — Seeing the letters on the boy’s chest, the woman remembers her own name. The possession of a name, after all, being all they share. “Lan,” she says. “Tên tôi là Lan.” My name is Lan. Lan meaning Lily. Lan the name she gave herself, having been born nameless. Because her mother simply called her Seven, the order in which she came into the world after her siblings. It was only after she ran away, at seventeen, from her arranged marriage to a man three times her age, that Lan named herself. One night, she brewed her husband a pot of tea, dropping a pinch of lotus stems to deepen his sleep, then waited till the palm-leaf walls shivered with his snoring. Through the flat black night, she made her way, feeling one low branch after another. Hours later, she knocked on the door to her mother’s house. “Seven,” her mother said through a crack in the door, “a girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest. You know this. How can you not know?” And then the door closed, but not before a hand, gnarled as wood, pressed a pair of pearl earrings into Lan’s grip. The mother’s pale face erased by the door’s swing, the lock’s click. The crickets were too loud as Lan stumbled toward the nearest streetlamp, then followed each dim post, one by one, until, by dawn, the city appeared, smeared with fog.

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

  Cold nights the guys crowd on, and if you arrive last, if you are on the edge, you could die, roll over a few inches and you’re a goner. The blower is a room of heat with no walls. My father stands in this room, invisible man in an invisible room in the invisible city. He sits beside the fallen man, steam rising, warming them.

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

  He agreed to let his friend Jimmy Chin film his process for what Chin imagined would be an amazing documentary, not only because Honnold was one of the few climbers who would consider something so dangerous but because no one had ever tried a free solo ascent of El Capitan. Nearly all climbers use ropes for safety when rock climbing. The human body can rarely survive a fall greater than eighty feet. For rock formations hundreds or even thousands of feet in vertical height, falling means dying. Even the world’s most skilled climbers (who consider themselves “free” climbers) acknowledge and accommodate the inevitability of gravity. Free climbers remain attached to ropes for safety but don’t use those ropes to assist their climb, in the same way trapeze artists or wire walkers would use a net (or ropes) to catch them only if they fall. Free climbing is considered a test of climbing skill that has the benefit of forgiveness if you slip more than eighty feet above the ground. Free solo climbing is the same test of skill, but you die the first time you make a mistake because there are no ropes to stop your fall from a fatal height. This is why there are so few free solo climbers, and most of the famous free solo climbers are no longer with us. Such a feat is the ultimate pass-fail test. Tommy Caldwell, another elite, hard-core climber and friend who helped Honnold practice, said, “Imagine an Olympic gold-medal level athletic achievement, that if you don’t get the gold medal, you’re going to die. That’s pretty much what free soloing El Cap is like. You have to do it perfectly.” Filming Honnold was also a difficult, expensive, and delicate process. Chin recruited a camera crew of experienced rock climbers. Like Chin and Caldwell, most of them were friends with Honnold. They had to figure out placing, setting up, and operating ten cameras at different spots on the route. They also had to do it invisibly, making sure to not interfere or assist with the climb. Honnold spent several months in 2016 practicing—with ropes—the intricacies of all thirty sections (known as “pitches’’) of the Freerider route. His training on the route was frequently documented by the film crew, including the time he slipped while practicing on Pitch 6, Freeblast Slab (480 feet up). He was attached to a rope, so his fall was “just” thirty feet, still far enough that he sprained his ankle and tore a ligament. Three weeks after his injury, only partially recovered, he resumed practice and soon decided to attempt his free solo climb, before the coming winter weather closed his window for 2016. The documentary crew filmed it all. On the morning of his attempt, he woke up at 3:30 and began climbing in the dark. The camera crew had to simultaneously stay out of sight and get to their positions.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House at Newton’s Apple Early in the summer, this guy drops you a line. When you first got to Iowa, he had flown into town and the two of you spent a weekend in bed together and it was a nice culmination of a few years of light internet flirtation. It turns out he’s in town for a conference for work, and he asks if you want to get dinner. You agree, even though you don’t really want to see him. You even agree to pick him up from his hotel— his request—although you don’t want to do that, either. Even as you’re driving to his hotel, you’re thinking about how you’re just doing what he’s asking you, the same way you’d respond to the woman in the Dream House, even though he’s just this random guy. You think about that as you pull up under the awning, as you drive him to the restaurant. He is talking to you. Even as you’re responding to him, even as you’re ordering and making small talk, you’re marveling at the fact that his maleness—the generic fact of it—has as much pull as a carefully curated, long-term abusive relationship. It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different levels of effort. You refuse to get a drink, pick at your meal. He insists on paying. You drive him back to the hotel. You pull in front of the entrance, and he smiles at you. “Why don’t you park so we can say good-bye?” he asks. You pull into the parking space around the corner. “Why don’t you walk me inside?” he says. “There’s a gorgeous koi pond in the lobby.” He’s not wrong. The soaring atrium is breathtaking. It’s nicer than any hotel you’ve ever stayed in. You bend over a bridge and look down at the koi, their muscular bodies the color of warning. You think about how much easier it would be to just sleep with him. He isn’t the worst guy in the world. The effort of resisting is exhausting. “I should go,” you say. “I have a thing at eight.” He makes a clucking sound in his throat, smiles. “Why don’t you come on up?” he says. “I have to go,” you say. He walks you back to your car, and as you fish your keys out of your purse, he kisses you. He keeps kissing you; he grabs your arms, pushes his tongue in your mouth. Your body goes rigid. You don’t fight, but you don’t respond. You briefly float outside your body and see yourself, the almost comedy of your mismatched libidos. When he pulls away, he does not seem to notice that you can feel nothing at all. He gives you a key card, tells you his room number, in case you change your mind. On the drive home you pull over near a parking garage and stumble out onto a patch of grass. You drop down into child’s pose and take deep, shuddering breaths as the car’s emergency signal ticks next to you. The grass catches the copper light: on and off and on again.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The enemy will be described as “amoral,” “irrational,” “untrustworthy,” or “aggressive,” the implication being that “our” group is the opposite. No side ever likes to admit it is not pure in its ethics, or has aggressive intentions, or is governed by emotion—it is always the other side. In the end, the need to feel a part of the tribe and against the other side is more important than the actual differences, which tend to be greatly exaggerated. Look at the group you belong to, and you will inevitably see some sort of enemy or bogeyman to push against. What you require is the ability to detach yourself from this dynamic and to see the “enemy” as it is, minus the distortions. You will not want to overtly display your skepticism—you might be seen as disloyal. Instead, keep your mind open so that you can resist the downward pull and overreactions that come from such tribal emotions. Take this even a step further by learning from the enemy, adapting some of its superior strategies. Group factions: Over enough time, individuals in a group will begin to split off into factions. The reason for this dynamic is simple: In a group, we get a narcissistic boost from being around those who share our values. But in a group over a certain size, this becomes too abstract. The differences among the members become noticeable. Our power to influence the group as individuals is reduced. We want something more immediate, and so we form subgroups and cliques with those who seem even more like us, giving us back that narcissistic boost. In this subgrouping, we now have power to divvy up, which increases its members’ sense of self- importance. Eventually the faction will experience its own splits from within, on and on. This splitting occurs unconsciously, almost as if it were responding to mechanical laws of group fission. If a faction gets strong enough, its members will start to give precedence to its interests over that of the greater group. Some leaders try to exploit this dynamic by playing one faction off the other, in the form of divide and conquer: the more the factions fight, the weaker they become, and the greater the power in the hands of the man or woman on top. Mao Zedong was a master at this game, but it is a dangerous one, because too much time tends to be wasted dealing with petty internal squabbles, and it can be hard to keep them all down.