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

  After more than a decade of working his way through the ranks at several schools as an assistant coach, he finally got his chance as a head coach at the University of Washington in 2013. He inherited a program in which his student athletes played or practiced six days a week, which was the status quo for college basketball teams. The NCAA mandates that Division I players get a minimum of one day off athletic activities each week, and pretty much every NCAA coach treats that minimum as a maximum. After many years of losing, the Huskies had rebounded in the previous two seasons under coach Kevin McGuff (who brought Neighbors in as an assistant). When McGuff took the head coaching job at Ohio State, it was on Neighbors to fulfill the rising expectations. His team immediately stumbled, losing its first two games, including a horrific loss, 91–77, in the home opener to the University of Portland, a team the Huskies beat by 20 points the year before under Coach McGuff. They improved a little, going into the Christmas break 6–4, but Neighbors could see he needed to make some changes. Minor injuries were piling up and he realized his starters couldn’t play heavy minutes in games given the intensity of practices. During the holiday break, he had the time and space to mull over how he might turn things around, and on the cross-country flight back to Washington, he decided to make a drastic change. He resolved to cut out one additional day of practice a week, giving his players two days off instead of one. He decided to make this unconventional move because his team was plagued by injuries. Their bodies were wearing out, and he knew from all his years as an assistant coach that those injuries would accumulate as the season went on. He surmised that the extra day of rest would get his players more time on the court when it mattered most—during games. To understand the boldness of this decision, you have to realize that no other Division I coach was doing this. This was at the end of 2013, long before the language of self-care became part of the zeitgeist. He knew he was taking a risk and he would take the blame if this decision didn’t work. But in his words, if the Huskies, and his coaching career, were going down, they were going to go down his way.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Dwight always went drinking with some other Scoutmasters, then picked me up outside Glenvale for the drive home. This year he would have a long wait. He would have a long wait, and a long drive home alone, and a long explanation to make to my mother when he pulled up to the house without me. I told no one but Arthur, who kept my secrets even when I betrayed his. He liked the plan. He thought so highly of it that he asked to be included. At first I said no. Being on my own was the whole idea. And Arthur had no money. But a few days before The Gathering of the Tribes I told him I’d changed my mind, that he could come along after all. I gave Arthur this news with a show of reluctance, as if I were doing him a favor, but really I was just afraid to be alone. ARTHUR’S FATHER, CAL , worked on the turbines in the powerhouse. He thought I was a great wit because I could always tell him a new joke. I got the jokes from “Today’s Chuckle,” a filler they ran on the front page of the paper. Whenever I visited Arthur, Cal said, “Well, Jackaroony, what’s the word?” “Woman bought three hundred pounds of steel wool. Says she’s going to knit a stove.” “Knit a stove! Knit a stove, you say! Oh that’s rich, that’s a beauty ....” and Cal would hold his sides and reel back and forth while Arthur and Mrs. Gayle looked on with disgust. He was a simple, sunny man well liked in the camp. Even the kids called him Cal. I never heard anyone call him Mr. Gayle. Once, at a beach house belonging to friends of theirs, I persuaded Cal to let me take Arthur out for a spin in a sailboat, claiming that back in Florida I had pretty much lived with a tiller in my hand. After being very nearly swept out to sea we ran aground a mile from the house. Arthur went up the beach and got Cal, but Cal didn’t know how to sail either, so he had to pull the boat home through the surf. He had a hard time of it—the wind was stiff and the waves high—but he didn’t stop laughing the whole way back. Arthur and Mrs. Gayle were complicated. They were complicated by themselves and exotically complicated when together, playing off each other in long cryptic riffs like a pair of scat singers, then falling heavily, portentously silent. They had a way of turning silence into accusation. Cal could not begin to understand them. Under their scrutiny he smiled and blinked his eyes. This seemed to compound the unspoken charges against him. Mrs. Gayle was a snob. She and Cal had been among the first to move into the camp, and she would have nothing to do with those who came afterwards. Mrs.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Well, he wanted those names, and he was going to get them if he had to keep every single one of us here all night long. The vice-principal was new and hard-nosed; he meant what he said. I knew he wouldn’t let this drop, that he would keep at it until he caught me. I got scared. Even more than his anger, his righteousness scared me to the point where my stomach cramped up. As the afternoon went on the cramp got worse and I had to go to the nurse’s office. That was where the vice-principal finally came for me. He kicked at the cot where I lay doubled up and sweating. “Get up,” he said. I gave him a confused look and said, “What?” “Get moving. Now!” I sat up partway, still miming incomprehension. The school nurse came to the doorway and asked what the problem was. The vice-principal told her I was faking. “I’m not either,” I said hotly. “He’s definitely in pain,” she told him. “He’s faking it,” the vice-principal said, and explained that this was nothing but a stratagem to avoid punishment for something disgusting I had done. The nurse turned to me with a quizzical expression. She had been warm and gentle; I couldn’t bear for her to think that I was the kind of person who took advantage of other people’s kindness, or wrote filth on bathroom walls. And at that moment I wasn’t. I began to say something along this line, but the viceprincipal wasn’t having any. “Let’s go,” he said. He grabbed one of my ears and brought me to my feet. “I’m not here to bandy words with you.” The nurse stared at him. “Now wait just a minute,” she said. He pulled me into the corridor and down toward his office, jerking on my ear so that I had to walk sideways and keep my face toward the ceiling, stumbling all the way and spastically waving my arms. “I’m going to call his mother,” the nurse said. “Right now!” “I already did,” the vice-principal said. BY THE TIME my mother arrived, I’d spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of my own innocence. The more I insisted on it the angrier he got, and the angrier he got the more impossible it was for me to believe that I had done anything to deserve such anger. He was, I knew, very close to hitting me; this made me feel a contempt for him that he could see, which in turn brought him closer to violence, inflating even further my sense of injury and innocence. And as his rage grew so did my contempt, because I saw that it was not self-restraint that kept him from hitting me but some kind of institutional restraint. But he still had me scared. It was like being lunged at by a dog on the end of its leash. Things stood thus when my mother came in.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Since time immemorial, people have attempted to cope with powerful and terrifying feelings by doing things that contradict perceptions of fear and helplessness: religious rituals, theater, dance, music, meditation and ingesting psychoactive substances, to name a few. Of these various methods for altering one’s way of being, modern medicine has accepted only the use of (limited, i.e., psychiatric) chemical substances. The other “coping” methods continue to find expression in alternative and so-called holistic approaches such as yoga, tai chi, exercise, drumming, music, shamanism and body-oriented techniques. While many people find help and solace from these valuable approaches, they are relatively nonspecific and do not sufficiently address certain core physiological mechanisms and processes that allow human beings to transform terrifying and overwhelming experiences. In the particular methodology I describe in these pages, the client is helped to develop an awareness and mastery of his or her physical sensations and feelings. My observations, in visiting a few indigenous cultures, suggest that this approach has a certain kinship with various traditional shamanic healing rituals. I am proposing that a collective, cross-cultural approach to healing trauma not only suggests new directions for treatment, but may ultimately inform a fundamentally deeper understanding of the dynamic two-way communication between mind and body. Over my lifetime, as well as in writing this book, I have attempted to bridge the vast chasm between the day-to-day work of the clinician and the findings of various scientific disciplines, particularly ethology, the study of animals in their natural environments. This vital field reached a pinnacle of recognition in 1973 when three ethologists—Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch—shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.* All three of these scientists utilized patient and precise observation to study how animals express and communicate through their bodies. Direct body communication is something that we reasoning, language-based human animals do as well. Despite our apparent reliance on elaborate speech, many of our most important exchanges occur simply through the “unspoken voice” of our body’s expressions in the dance of life. The deciphering of this nonverbal realm is a foundation of the healing approach that I present in this book.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Because of the central importance of restoring these lost (rather, misplaced) instinctive active responses in healing trauma, I will—at the risk of repetition—address this subject from a slightly different angle. It can be said that the experience of fear derives from the primitive responses to threat where escape is thwarted (i.e., in some way—actual or perceived—prevented or conflicted).54 Contrary to what you might expect, when one’s primary responses of fight-or-flight (or other protective actions) are executed freely, one does not necessarily experience fear, but rather the pure and powerful, primary sensations of fighting or fleeing. Recall, the response to threat involves an initial mobilization to fight or flee. It is only when that response fails that it “defaults” to one’s freezing or being “scared stiff” or to collapsing helplessly. In my case, in the ambulance, it was in my limbs—in the micro-movements of my arms rising upward to protect my head from mortal injury—that I first felt an opposite experience that contradicted my sensation of helplessness. For Nancy, it was her legs running to escape the doctor’s surgical knife. In both cases, consciously feeling our way through these active self-protective reflexes with precision brought us the physical sense of agency and power. Together, these experiences countered our feelings of overwhelming helplessness. Step by step, our bodies learned that we were not helpless victims, that we had survived our ordeals, and that we were intact and alive to the core of our beings. Along with instilling active defensive responses (which reduces fear), individuals learn that when they experience the physical sensations of paralysis, it is with less and less fear—each time trauma loosens its grip. With such a body-based epiphany, the mind’s interpretation of what happened and the meaning of it to one’s life and who one is shifts profoundly. Step 6. Uncoupling fear from immobilityMy clinical observations, drawn from more than four decades of work with thousands of clients, have led me to the solid understanding that the “physio-logical” ability to go into, and then come out of, the innate (hard-wired) immobility response is the key both to avoiding the prolonged debilitating effects of trauma and to healing even entrenched symptoms.55 Basically, this is done by separating fear and helplessness from the (normally time-limited) biological immobility response as described in Chapter 4. For a traumatized individual, to be able to touch into his or her immobility sensations, even for a brief moment, restores self-paced termination and allows the “unwinding” of fear and freeze to begin.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Vaccine When I was a kid, I learned that you develop immunity when an illness rages through your body. Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn’t just heal—it learns. It remembers. (All of this, of course, if the virus doesn’t kill you first.) After the Dream House, I developed a sixth sense. It goes off at random times—meeting a new classmate or coworker, a friend’s new girlfriend, a stranger at a party. A physical revulsion that comes on the heels of nothing at all, something akin to the sour liquid rush of saliva that precedes vomiting. Inconvenient, irritating, but important: my brilliant body’s brilliant warning. Dream House as Ending That there’s a real ending to anything is, I’m pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go. Where to stop this story? Val’s and my wedding, on a hot day in June? Some narratively satisfying confrontation between the woman from the Dream House and me? If you grasp the story by the base and pull, will the ripping sound indicate the looseness of the roots? What is left behind in the soil? Should I loop back to a memory from the Dream House? A lovely one? Will that work, a contrast between what could have been and what was? A memory of the two of us freshly returned from a local winery, sipping on a spicy Zinfandel and eating some kind of feta dip and telling a story? One day the woman from the Dream House will die, and I will die, and Val will die, and John and Laura will die, and my brother will die, and my parents will die, and her parents will die, and everyone who ever knew any of us will die. Is that the end of the story? Time’s mindless, chattering advancement? There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.” It’s the only true kind of ending. Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Almost two years had passed since I’d shucked them and stored them away. In all that time no one had said a word about them. They’d been forgotten by everyone but me, and I’d kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to remind Dwight to give me the job again. We climbed up into the attic and worked our way down to where I’d put the boxes. It was cramped and musty. From below I could hear faint voices singing. Dwight led the way, probing the darkness with a flashlight. When he found the boxes he stopped and held the beam on them. Mold covered the cardboard sides and rose from the tops of the boxes like dough swelling out of a breadpan. Its surface, dark and solid-looking, gullied and creased like cauliflower, glistened in the light. Dwight played the beam over the boxes, then turned it on the basin where the beaver, also forgotten these two years past, had been left to cure. Only a pulp remained. This too was covered with mold, but a different kind than the one that had gotten the chestnuts. This mold was white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet or so above the basin. It was like cotton candy but more loosely spun. And as Dwight played the light over it I saw something strange. The mold had no features, of course, but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air. If Dwight noticed it he didn’t say anything. I followed him back downstairs and into the living room. My mother had gone to bed, but everyone else was still watching TV. Dwight picked up his saxaphone again and played silently along with the Champagne Orchestra. The tree blinked. Our faces darkened and flared, darkened and flared. By the time I started my first year at Concrete High School, I had over eighty dollars squirreled away in the ammunition box. Some of it had been given to me by customers on my paper route, as tips for good service; the rest I’d stolen from other customers. Eighty dollars seemed a lot of money, more than enough for my purpose, which was to run away to Alaska. I planned to travel alone under an assumed name. Later on, when I had my feet on the ground, I would send for my mother. It was not hard to imagine our reunion in my cabin: her grateful tears and cries of admiration at the pelt-covered walls, the racks of guns, the tame wolves dozing before the fire. Our Scout troop went to Seattle every November for The Gathering of the Tribes. In the morning we competed with other troops. In the afternoon all the Scouts converged on Glenvale, an amusement park reserved that day for our use.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  104The History of Christianity II õTwenty-five years after the Battle of Manzikert, Pope Urban II called on the kings and princes of Europe to ride east in the hopes of rescuing the Byzantines and reclaiming the Holy Land from Muslim rule—a campaign known as the First Crusade. In the generations that followed, even Muslim rulers relatively far from the path of the Crusaders came to see their own Christian subjects as allies of those bloodthirsty infidel intruders. õThe Seljuk Empire was relatively short-lived. But soon another, far more durable Muslim power arrived on the scene: the Ottomans. In 1453, Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, fell to Sultan Mehmed II and his Ottoman Turk army. By this point, the territory of the Byzantine Empire was a tiny sliver of what it had been at its height 1,000 years earlier, and centuries of Muslim dominance had decimated Christian communities in huge parts of Asia Minor, North Africa, and the Middle East. õYet Eastern Christianity was not dead—far from it. In the late Middle Ages their communities shrank and their political status became more constrained, but these Christian minorities began to settle into a new, relatively stable existence. õWhen Mehmed gave Byzantium its deathblow, his aim was not to destroy Christianity in the lands he now controlled. It would be more accurate to say that he wanted to turn Christians into loyal subjects who would, he hoped, eventually convert to Islam. But in the meantime, he turned the church into a tool to consolidate his power. 105Lecture 11—Christians under Muslim Rule CHRISTIAN LIFE UNDER THE OTTOMANS õMehmed immediately installed a new patriarch, Gennadios Scholarios, who would be in his back pocket. The Turks made the office of the patriarch a powerful position as head of the Christian millet.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  139 Four of her poems—#214, 348, 216, and 449—illustrate these generalizations. We will consider each of the poems in turn.First, poem #214, a response to a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, suggests that the only heaven we can be sure of is the emotional intoxication that can come from a close observance of and participation in the details of nature. Poem #348 is about the way nature always reminds us of our own transience. Spring actually hurts the poet by reminding her that while it always renews itself, she is another year older and that much closer to death. Poem #216 is wonderfully ambiguous in its consideration of the question of whether we in some ways live beyond our own deaths. The poem faces up to its questions, but it can provide us with no ¿ nal answers, either optimistic or pessimistic. Poem #449 is a response to John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It is ambiguous in its consideration of the value of living and dying for some large abstraction outside ourselves, whether that be Beauty or Truth. One of its central messages is that we cannot be sure of what it is that does (or does not) survive our deaths. From her hermitage in Amherst, Dickinson participated in some of the great literary movements in the world outside. With Faust, Heathcliff and Catherine, and Lord Byron, she is a Romantic rebel, daring to think and say things in her poems that would have greatly shocked those in her immediate world. As one critic has said it, she was a Romantic hero in an upstairs bedroom. With Flaubert, Emily Brontë, and Ibsen, she is a recorder of the constraints on women in the 19 th century; contemporary feminists have thus discovered in her a kindred spirit. Her poems seem very modern to us, not only in their questioning of conventional and accepted beliefs (which she shares with an early Modern poet like Thomas Hardy), but in their reliance on metaphors and images to communicate their meaning (which she shares with Ezra Pound, H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], and T. S. Eliot). Ŷ She de¿ ed conventions in many ways. … As one critic says, “She’s a Romantic in an upstairs bedroom,” a rebel in every way that matters to us.

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

  Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles176 176 for the oral–scribal intertextural prophetic unit that portends the impending “day of the Lord.” Such a reader, who then digs deep and recalls not only the Amos text, but is from there reminded of the Judges text, and perhaps others, “understands” yet one more clue of what is coming. Such a reader “gets it” in a way that the three disciples on the Mount of Olives (Mark 13)—the same three who flee and abandon Jesus on the same Mount only a day later—did not, such that when the “day” did come (at least appeared) they are entirely unprepared to stand firm in the violent, chaotic, and confusing time. 103 Doubtless they had not realized that the same kind of wild violence that had felled the Amorites, and Babylon (LXX Isa 13:10), was now going to fell Jerusalem. When it begins proleptically in the garden, they fail utterly. 104 As such, while the Markan narrative of chapter 13 and the later narrative of 14 present the final judgment in such a way that even the High Priest himself understands perfectly well what is being foretold (14:62), Mark 14:51–52, and the narrative immediately on either side of it, presents us with an especially ominous word for those who are associated with Jesus, either as followers or as bystanders. In the chaos and confusion all will flee from Jesus, including the disciples who accompanied him. True, Peter returns to the narrative but only to deny Jesus and then disappear from the pages of the gospel. In the end even the last characters of the gospel, the women who come to the tomb, flee, just as the young man had from the garden, presumably out of fear. The women’s one commission—to tell Jesus’ disciples that he would meet them in Galilee (Mark 16:7)—remains unfulfilled in the Gospel of Mark, unlike the other gospels. In this light, one may ask whether even the νεανίσκος in the tomb—depicted in Matthew (like an angel) or in Luke (like two men garbed in transfiguration-like clothes)—is, like other νεανίσκοι, rhetorically associated with violence and chaos. 105 Therefore, our analysis of Mark 14:51–52 leaves us with a question rather than an answer: when the “day of the Lord” comes not just with the proleptic chaos, confusion, and violence we find here, but fully when the Son of Man comes in judgment, who will stand firm in the midst of the smoke and flames? Certainly, “watch” (Mark 13:37), he tells the three on the Mount, but in watching “understand” (Mark 13:14) that no one is prepared for the fire of tribulation that is coming. Will anyone? 106 Given Matthew’s extended resurrection appearances, including most significantly the so-called Great Commission of Matt 28:16–20, it is possible that Mark’s apocalyptic rhetoric clashed with Matthew’s wisdom rhetoric, which was grounded in a longer-term

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Of equal importance in resolving trauma is therapeutic restraint in not allowing the unwinding to occur precipitously. As with the nontitrated chemical reaction, abrupt decoupling can be explosive, frightening and potentially retraumatizing to the client. Through titration, the client is gradually led into and out of the immobility sensations many times, each time returning to a calming equilibrium (the “Alka-Seltzer fizzle”). In exiting from immobility, there is an “initiation by fire”; the intense energy-packed sensations that are biologically coupled with undirected flight and rage-counterattack are released. Understandably, people commonly fear both entering and exiting immobility, especially when they are not aware of the benefit of doing so. Let us look more deeply into these fears. The fear of entering immobility: We avoid experiencing the sensations of immobility because of how powerful they are and how helpless and vulnerable they make us feel. Some of these even mimic the death state. When you consider how the thought of something as routine as being compelled to sit rigidly still in the dentist’s chair can cause you to wince, you begin to understand the challenge of voluntarily entering immobility mode. You may anticipate the pain of being trapped with no way to escape. For anxious or traumatized individuals, having to lie immobile during an MRI or CT scan can be downright terrifying. For children, these procedures may be vastly more difficult. Sitting quietly at one’s desk, unable to move for hours at a stretch, is a challenge for any youngster. For an anxious or “sensitive” child, it can be unbearable, perhaps even contributing to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. This may be especially true for children who have had to undergo immobilizing procedures, such as when casts or metal braces are required for orthopedic correction of hips, legs, ankles or feet during the developmental stage when a child would normally be learning how to walk, run and explore the world.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether some defect is a cause of daring?Objection 1: It would seem that some defect is a cause of daring. For the Philosopher says (De Problem. xxvii, 4) that “lovers of wine are strong and daring.” But from wine ensues the effect of drunkenness. Therefore daring is caused by a defect. Objection 2: Further, the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 5) that “those who have no experience of danger are bold.” But want of experience is a defect. Therefore daring is caused by a defect. Objection 3: Further, those who have suffered wrongs are wont to be daring; “like the beasts when beaten,” as stated in Ethic. iii, 5. But the suffering of wrongs pertains to defect. Therefore daring is caused by a defect. On the contrary, The Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 5) that the cause of daring “is the presence in the imagination of the hope that the means of safety are nigh, and that the things to be feared are either non-existent or far off.” But anything pertaining to defect implies either the removal of the means of safety, or the proximity of something to be feared. Therefore nothing pertaining to defect is a cause of daring. I answer that, As stated above ([1409]AA[1],2) daring results from hope and is contrary to fear: wherefore whatever is naturally apt to cause hope or banish fear, is a cause of daring. Since, however, fear and hope, and also daring, being passions, consist in a movement of the appetite, and in a certain bodily transmutation; a thing may be considered as the cause of daring in two ways, whether by raising hope, or by banishing fear; in one way, in the part of the appetitive movement; in another way, on the part of the bodily transmutation. On the part of the appetitive movement which follows apprehension, hope that leads to daring is roused by those things that make us reckon victory as possible. Such things regard either our own power, as bodily strength, experience of dangers, abundance of wealth, and the like; or they regard the powers of others, such as having a great number of friends or any other means of help, especially if a man trust in the Divine assistance: wherefore “those are more daring, with whom it is well in regard to godlike things,” as the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 5). Fear is banished, in this way, by the removal of threatening causes of fear; for instance, by the fact that a man has not enemies, through having harmed nobody, so that he is not aware of any imminent danger; since those especially appear to be threatened by danger, who have harmed others.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as the River Lethe Later that fall, she asks you to join her at the Harvard-Yale football game. It is a favorite tradition of hers, and she has flown there for the occasion, but she needs to be back in Indiana earlier than expected. “If you drive there, you can bring me back,” she says. You drive from Iowa to Connecticut to meet her. And so after a day of autumn temperatures and flask sips and people in furs and expensive bottles of champagne rolling around on the muddy ground like Budweiser cans, you sleep hard in an uncomfortable hotel bed. The next afternoon—after delays, and brunch with her friends, and more delays—you prepare to leave. She is a reckless driver—nothing has changed since that trip to Savannah—so you get behind the wheel of your car without asking. You pull away from New Haven alternating between the radio, conversation, and silence. You scoot down through Connecticut and New York. In Pennsylvania the light drops away early, and rain glosses the pavement. Somewhere in the middle of the endless, hilly length of this state, the one you’d grown up in, she interrupts herself midsentence. “Why won’t you let me drive?” she asks. Her voice is controlled, measured, like a dog whose tail has gone rigid; nothing is happening, but something is wrong. Dread gathers between your shoulder blades. “I’m okay driving,” you say. “You’re tired,” she says. “Too tired to drive.” “I’m not,” you say, and you aren’t. “You’re too tired, and you’re going to kill us,” she says. The timbre of her voice hasn’t changed. “You hate me. You want me to die.” “I don’t hate you,” you say. “I don’t want you to die.” “You hate me,” she says, her voice going up half an octave with every syllable. “You’re going to kill us and you don’t even care, you selfish bitch.” “I— ” “You selfish bitch.” She begins to pound the dashboard. “You selfish bitch, you selfish bitch, you selfish—” You pull off at the next exit and park at a gas station. She throws open the passenger door even before the car stops moving and stalks around the parking lot like a teenage boy who is trying to cool down before he punches a wall. You sit in the driver’s seat, watching her pace. The urge to cry is present, but far off, as if you’re high. When she starts walking back toward the car, her eyes fixed on your face, you hastily unbuckle your seat belt and run to the passenger seat. You don’t want her to leave without you, and you’re not sure she won’t. Afterward, the drive is framed by the wet, dark mountains. You remember going through Pennsylvania around Christmas the year before and seeing eighteen-wheelers overturned on the side of these same roads, their engine blocks blackened by extinguished fires. And cars, too, on the highway’s shoulder, casually burning.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We inched forward, and then the noise began again just in front of us, and everyone around me started shouting as they turned to face a long building of concrete and glass, five or six stories high. Only the sculpture in front of it marked it out, I had passed it before without paying much attention to the building it adorned. It showed seven or eight figures in battle, some taking aim with rifles, others cradling fallen comrades, the whole dominated by a large, stylized figure of a woman on one knee, her arm flung forward, the fingers outstretched in a gesture that had always seemed moving to me, more moving now that she was outlined by the single lit window of a convenience store behind her. The march had come to a standstill, people were yelling cherveni boklutsi again and again as they shook their fists, suddenly a man standing right beside me sounded his air horn. Jesus, I must have said, covering my ear and shaking my head a little like an animal, and M. looked up at me, concerned. The mood was changing as the chant broke down and became something less choate and more animalistic, hisses and boos, and then I felt the pressure to move again, not in the same direction as before but toward the building and the line of police guarding it. The police felt it too, that pressure, they came to attention, lifting their shields an inch or two and locking them in place. I said something then, This could be bad or something to that effect, and I felt M.’s hand on my arm, though she couldn’t have heard what I said, there was too much noise and anyway I had whispered it, I was saying it mostly to myself. Points of red light were tracing patterns on the building’s concrete façade, people had brought laser pointers, which were harmless of course and also sinister, they aimed them like the laser sights of rifles. The sound of the crowd grew louder, that inchoate sound, formless and primal, inhuman, hardly animal now but primordial, chthonic, like a sound the earth would make. It wasn’t an animal sound but it elicited an animal response, or did for me, anyway, a fear that would have made me run had there been anywhere to run to, that instead made me grow very still. At the front of the crowd now, facing the police, six or seven men in Guy Fawkes masks had suddenly appeared. The masks seemed like an invitation to violence, to commit it or be subjected to it, and I thought I could see the police they were facing lean forward as if to meet them. There was the sound of glass breaking, a bottle thrown over the heads of the police, and almost at the same time a weird crackling and sudden fluorescence of flat red light. Someone behind us had lit a flare, and in response the noise died down, as if everyone had taken a breath. But the pressure I had felt didn’t dissipate, in the suspension of our breath it mounted and became unbearable, demanding release, and though we didn’t quite move it was as if everyone leaned very slightly forward, a wave on the brink of cresting. We hung fire, that’s what it felt like, that phrase from nineteenth-century novels I had never quite understood, I understood it now. Whatever happened I would be swept along with it, whether I wanted to be or not, what I wanted was irrelevant. In the light of the flare I saw a policewoman’s face, a young woman, hardly older than M.; behind the plastic visor her eyes flicked from right to left in fear. And then, just as I felt myself lean further forward, propelled not by any will of my own but by a larger will, ready to spring, from the very back of the crowd a man began to sing. Immediately other voices joined him, soon everyone was singing the national anthem, which is restrained and minor-key, as much mournful as celebratory, nothing like my own country’s anthem, and it was as if the crowd relaxed into it; the pressure that had built dissolved, the song caught it and dispersed it. The police relaxed too, leaning back again, the crowd began to move, the fear I had felt became relief and then, as we turned the corner, something like joy, which I saw reflected on M.’s face and on the other faces around me; everyone was smiling again, beneficent, a nation again, that was what I felt, an ideal nation.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  R. was late, as always, and after half an hour I had begun to wonder whether he would come at all. He often canceled our plans, usually after I had rearranged my own schedule to accommodate his, however inconvenient it was; and sometimes he didn’t give any notice, just an apology hours after I had given up waiting. It was a popular restaurant, busy with the dinner rush, and I could feel myself becoming a spectacle, quiet in a convivial room, a bit of negative space. I had already fended off several approaches from the servers, saying I was waiting for a friend, he was on his way, gesturing to my lifeless phone as though I had heard from him, though in fact he hadn’t responded to the texts I sent. The waiters had become more insistent as the tables around me filled; soon I would have to order something or leave. Even inside we could hear the wind; it was a sound above our human voices, a sound beyond the scale of living things. I always forgave R. when he didn’t appear, I accepted any excuse he offered, whatever my annoyance I never complained. I wanted to think of this as patience, but really I knew it was fear; I would push him away if I demanded too much. I had been sitting too long now, I was steeling myself to go, when with a sudden increase of noise and a change of pressure, a slight disorder in the air, the door opened and R. came in. He was wearing a hat and scarf and a heavy winter coat, though it wasn’t very cold; but then he was from a warm country, it was his first real fall. He grew up in the Azores, and though his town seemed beautiful in the photos I had found online, orderly white houses brilliant against the sea, he would never go back there, he said; it was a small place, he hated small places. He saw me right away, and without waiting to be greeted by a server he began making his way over, pulling off his hat and scarf as he walked. I was struck again by his beauty, which was offhand and accidental, with his disheveled hair and ruffled clothes, a beauty stripped of self-regard. Even though it was familiar to me I felt it as a kind of physical force, not welcoming me but pushing me off, so that I was always astonished to find I could take him in my arms. This was what I did now, embracing him though I had intended to remain seated, to greet him coolly and punish him a little. We parted after a second or two, but not before I heard R. make a sound I had come to love, a little grunt of happiness, a homecoming sound, and all my irritation drained away.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Bitch, he said softly several times, softly but viciously, mrusna kuchka, dirty bitch, get out. It was a reprieve, permission to leave, and I pulled the chain from my neck and stood, after a fashion, hunched as I was around pain. I felt nothing of what I had thought I might feel in standing, I reclaimed nothing, nothing at all returned. I dressed as quickly as I could, though it seemed I was moving slowly, as if in a fog or a dream, I put my socks and my belt in my pockets, I left my shirt unbuttoned. I watched the man where he watched me, sitting now with his back to the wall. I turned away from him finally, I went to the door and felt something like panic again when the knob refused to turn. Like all doors here it had several locks and I looked at them hopelessly, turning first one and then another and finding the door still locked, more locked now that I had turned more latches, and this was like a dream also, of endlessness and the impossibility of escape; stupid, I thought, or maybe I whispered it to myself, stupid, stupid. The man rose then, I heard or felt him heave himself up and walk to the door. Kuchko, he said, not angrily now but mockingly, shaking his head a little, pacified perhaps by the fear that was evident as he reached around me to unlock the door, as I pressed myself as best I could into the wall behind me; there was nowhere to go, the corridor was narrow, and it was hard not to touch him as he opened the door, as I tried to slip past, feeling again what he wanted me to feel, I think, that if I left it was because he let me leave, that it was his will and not my own that opened the door. And then he seemed to change his mind, when I stepped into the dark hall he grabbed my shoulder, gripping me hard, not to pull me back but to spin me around, making me face him a final time. Things happened very fast then, I had brought my hands up when he grabbed me, to ward or fight him off, though I couldn’t have fought him off, I’ve never struck anyone, really, never in earnest. Still, I lifted my hands, palms up at my chest, and when again as at the beginning of our encounter he spat into my face, which was why he had grabbed me and spun me around, to spit again with great violence into my face, I placed my hands on his chest and pushed or tried to push him away from me. But he didn’t fall back, I hardly moved him at all, maybe he staggered just slightly but immediately he sprang forward, with the kind of savagery or abandon I could never allow myself he lunged to strike at me. Maybe he had staggered just slightly and that was why he missed, his aim failing as he lunged or fell forward into the hallway, where I was already moving toward the stairway, off-balance myself, almost reaching it before his hands were on me again, both of his hands now grabbing me and throwing me forward so that I fell down the stairs, or almost fell; by luck I stayed on my feet, though I landed on my right foot in a way that strained or tore something, I would limp for weeks. And maybe it’s only in retrospect that I think I chose how I landed, though I have a memory, an instant of clearheadedness in which I knew he wasn’t finished with me, though he was naked and it was dangerous for him I knew he would follow me, and so I think I decided as I fell forward not to catch myself against the concrete wall but instead to strike the small window there, hitting the pane with my right palm hard, shattering it. The noise did what I wanted, he turned and raced for his door, and in the instant I looked up at him I saw he was frightened. I ran or stumbled down the flights of stairs, and reached the door just as the hallway lights went on, some neighbor above drawn out by the sound.

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

  There are times, late at night, when your son would wake believing a bullet is lodged inside him. He’d feel it floating on the right side of his chest, just between the ribs. The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself—and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn’t me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother’s womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around. Even now, as the cold creeps in around him, he feels it poking out from his chest, slightly tenting his sweater. He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It’s receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears. Across town, facing the window, you consider reheating the noodles one more time. You sweep into your palm pieces of the paper napkin you had torn up, then get up to toss it out. You return to the chair, wait. That window, the same one your son had stopped at one night before coming in, the square of light falling across him as he watched your face, peering out at him. Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there, only the lines scored across your cheeks and brow, a face somehow ravaged by stillness. The boy, he watches his mother watch nothing, his entire self inside the phantom oval of her face, invisible. The song long over, the cold a numbing sheath over their nerves. Under their clothes, goose bumps appear, making their thin, translucent hair rise, then bend against the fabric under their shirts. “Hey Trev,” your son says, his friend’s blood crusted tight on his cheek. “Tell me a secret.” Wind, pine needles, seconds. “What kind?” “Just—like . . . a normal secret. It doesn’t have to suck.” “A normal one.” The hush of thinking, steady breaths. The stars above them a vast smudge on a hastily-wiped chalkboard. “Can you go first?” On the table across town, your fingers stop drumming the Formica. “Okay. You ready?” “Yeah.” You push back your chair, grab your keys, and walk out the door. “I’m not scared of dying anymore.” (A pause, then laughter.) The cold, like river water, rises to their throats. Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.

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

  As the engine steamed, we felt our ribs for broken bones, then bolted out of the gasoline-reeked pickup, crossed the rest of the cornfield behind Trevor’s house, past the wheelless John Deere tractor suspended on cinder blocks, the empty chicken coop with latches rusted shut, over the small plastic white fence invisible under a choke of brambles, then through crabgrass and under the highway overpass, toward the pines. Dry leaves crashing past us. Trevor’s old man running toward the wrecked truck, the only car they owned, neither of us with the guts to look back. How do I tell you about Trevor without telling you, again, of those pines? How it was an hour after the Chevy that we lay there, the cold seeping up from the forest floor. How we sang “This Little Light of Mine” until the blood on our faces grabbed around our lips and stiffened us quiet. — The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all. I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim—the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible. In Trevor’s mobile home, there was a painting of a bowl of peaches in the hallway that always caught me. The hallway was too narrow and you could only see it from inches away, more aftermath than art. I had to stand a little to the side to see it in full. Each time I walked by I slowed down, taking it in. A cheap painting from Family Dollar, mass-produced with vague indications of impressionism. When I examined the brushstrokes, I saw that they were not painted on at all, but printed on with speckled relief, suggesting a hand without enacting the real. The relief “strokes” never cohered with their shades, so that a stroke would hold two, even three colors at once. A fake. A fraud. Which was why I loved it. The materials never suggested authenticity, but rather, an inconspicuous sameness, a desire to pass as art only under the most cursory glance. It hung on the wall, hidden in the gloomy hallway that led to Trevor’s room. I never asked who put it there. Peaches. Pink peaches. Under the humid sheets, he pressed his cock between my legs. I spat in my hand and reached back, grabbed tight his heated length, mimicking the real thing, as he pushed. I glanced back and caught the thrilled mischief in his eyes. Although this was a mock attempt, a penis in a fist in place of the inner self, for a moment it was real. It was real because we didn’t have to look—as if we fucked and unfucked at a distance from our bodies, yet still inside the sensation, like a memory.

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

  For thousands of years, the poets have known that love is risky. There’s a scene in the Song of Songs, a collection of poems in the Bible, where the woman sees her lover, whom she calls her “beloved,” and he’s coming toward her. She says, “Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills.”1 But when he makes it to her house, he can’t get in. She says, “There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice.” In the days these lines were written, people were often married as teenagers, so this courtship we’re reading of is probably between high school students. Kids. Which explains the “our wall” part. She’s still living at home. She’s under her parents’ roof. She’s living with her brothers and sisters and probably her extended family—aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. Her life is safe. Predictable. Her family provides for her. Her father and her brothers protect her. And what is this chap saying to her? He says, “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me.” He’s inviting her to a new life. A life with him. He continues, “See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. The fig tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.” And then he repeats, “Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.” He reminds her that it’s that time of the year. The time of new life, new growth, sprouting, budding, blooming. It’s as if he points to the explosion of spring going on all around them in nature and says to her, “This could be us!” So much potential, adventure, possibility. This could be us! Come with me! This guy doesn’t give up, does he? You at least want to give him points for trying. Especially the part about the doves. Gentlemen, try saying “cooing” with a straight face. You gotta hand it to the fella. But enough about his invitation. Do you see the terrifying spot this puts her in? Does she leave? Does she go to the door in the wall and walk through it to the other side? Because it isn’t just a wall, it’s a way of life. If she says yes to his offer, she’s trading what she knows for the unknown. What if it doesn’t work out? What if he isn’t who he appears to be? What if he’s making this pitch to girls all over town? What if he hits her? What if he goes to war next year and doesn’t return, ever? This could all blow up in her face. What if her family doesn’t think he’s right for her, and she goes anyway and it doesn’t work out? How agonizing would it be for her to hear from her relatives for the rest of her life, “I told you so”?

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I pulled the door open and stepped outside and began walking fast down the street. I passed a few shops and then I heard her voice behind me again— “Thomas!” I quickened my pace. She kept following and calling out to me. I looked over my shoulder. She was running, slowly and clumsily, but running. I squeezed the overnight bag against my side with my elbow and broke into a run myself. The two of us ran down the street, twenty, twenty-five feet apart. I was holding back, just loping along. “Thomas!” she said, “Thomas, wait!” and every time she spoke I felt a tug from this voice so full of care. I felt she knew all of me, all my foolishness and trouble, and wanted only to take hold of me and set me right. The sidewalk was crowded. If the men and women we ran through had thought there was any reason to stop me, they would have. If she had yelled “Thief!” just once, I would have been mobbed on the spot. Everyone must have thought it was a family affair. They must have heard what I heard, the voice of a mother trying to reach her child. I turned the corner at the end of the block, and this somehow broke her hold on me. All the speed I’d been saving seemed to come to me at once. I tore down to the next corner, turned, turned again half a block later and ran through an alley. Only then did I slow down and look behind me. She could not possibly have kept up, but I needed to look to be sure. She wasn’t there. I had lost her. I believed I had lost her forever, but in this I was mistaken. The alley ended across the street from a diner. The street was under repair. No cars, only a few pedestrians. I waited for a time, trying to get my wind back, then crossed over to the diner. It was almost empty. The cashier grunted when I came in but didn’t look up from the tablet he was writing on. I walked to the back and locked myself in the men’s room. I leaned against the door. I stood there, just letting myself breathe. My eyes burned with sweat and my shirt was soaked through. My throat was raw. I bent my head to the faucet and let the water run into my mouth. Then I stripped to the waist and bathed myself with paper towels. When I was dry, I took off my pants and stuffed them into the overnight bag with my shirt and my glasses. I took out my Boy Scout uniform and slowly, carefully, unfolded it and put it on. I ran a damp tissue over my shoes, then straightened up and inspected myself.