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 The Decameron (1353)

  And so saying, they seized him and dragged him away; then they took him by the hair, tore every stitch of clothing from his back, and started to punch and to kick him. In fact, everybody within sight was bearing down upon him, or so it seemed to Martellino. ‘Mercy, for the love of God!’ he cried, defending himself as best he could. But it was of no use, for more and more people were piling on top of him every minute. When Marchese and Stecchi saw what was happening, they began to have serious misgivings. Fearing for their own safety, they dared not go to Martellino’s assistance, but on the contrary they yelled ‘Kill him!’ as loudly as anybody else, at the same time trying to devise some way of rescuing him from the hands of the mob. And he would certainly have been killed but for a quick piece of thinking on the part of Marchese, who made his way as swiftly as possible to the captain in charge of the watch, drawn up in strength outside the church, and said to him: ‘For God’s sake, come quickly! There’s a villain over here who has cut my purse, and robbed me of a hundred gold florins at the very least. Arrest him! Please don’t let him run off with my money!’ On hearing this, a dozen or more of the officers rushed over to the place where poor Martellino was having his brains beaten out, and after forcing their way through the crowd with enormous difficulty, they removed him all bruised and battered from their clutches, and hauled him off to the magistrate’s palace. A number of people followed him all the way, still angry with him for hoodwinking them, and when they heard he had been arrested as a cutpurse, they too began to claim that he had stolen their purses, thinking this as fair a way as any of making life unpleasant for him. The magistrate, who was of a harsh disposition, no sooner heard these accusations than he took him aside and began to interrogate him on the matter. But Martellino gave him facetious answers, as though quite unconcerned at his arrest. This upset the judge, who had him fastened to the strappado, and ordered him to be given a series of good hard blows, with the intention of extracting a confession from him before having him hanged. When they let him down, and the judge asked him whether the accusations brought against him were true, he replied, since a straight denial would have been useless: ‘Sir, I am ready to confess the truth. But make each of my accusers say when and where I cut his purse, and I will tell you whether or not I did it.’

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  The body of misinformation about trauma, its treatment, and a traumatized person’s prospects for recovery is astounding. Even many professionals who specialize in trauma don’t understand it. Inevitably, misinformation leads to anxiety and more suffering. A Traumatized Person's Reality All of us have had experiences that lose something in the telling. Shrugging it off, we say, “You had to be there.” Trauma is such an experience. Words can’t accurately convey the anguish that a traumatized person experiences. It has an intensity that defies description. Many traumatized people feel that they live in a personal hell in which no other human could possibly share. While this is not entirely true, elements of this perception are accurate. Here is a condensation of what severely traumatized individuals struggle with: I don’t know of one thing I don’t fear. I fear getting out of bed in the morning. I fear walking out of my house. I have great fears of deat h… not that I will die someday, but that I am going to die within the next few minutes. I fear ange r… my own and everyone else’s, even when anger is not present. I fear rejection and/or abandonment. I fear success and failure. I get pain in my chest, and tingling and numbness in my arms and legs every day. I almost daily experience cramps ranging from menstrual-type cramps to intense pain. I just really hurt most of the time. I feel that I can’t go on. I have headaches. I feel nervous all the time. I have shortness of breath, racing heart, disorientation, and panic. I’m always cold, and I have dry mouth. I have trouble swallowing. I have no energy or motivation, and when I do accomplish something, I feel no sense of satisfaction. I feel overwhelmed, confused, lost, helpless, and hopeless daily. I have uncontrollable outbursts of rage and depression. Get On with Your Life If it hurts, hide it. — Michael Martin Murphy from Cowboy Logic Because the symptoms and emotions associated with trauma can be extreme, most of us (and those close to us) will recoil and attempt to repress these intense reactions. Unfortunately, this mutual denial can prevent us from healing. In our culture there is a lack of tolerance for the emotional vulnerability that traumatized people experience. Little time is allotted for the working through of emotional events. We are routinely pressured into adjusting too quickly in the aftermath of an overwhelming situation. Denial is so common in our culture that it has become a cliché. How often have you heard these words? “Pull yourself together, its over now. You should forget about it. Grin and bear it. It’s time to get on with your life.” Who Is Traumatized? Our ability to respond appropriately when faced with danger and threat is determined by a number of different factors:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Oh, for the love of God, have mercy!’ she said. ‘Don’t allow yourself to murder someone who never did you any harm, just for the sake of obeying an order. As God is my witness, I have never given my husband the slightest cause for taking my life. But leaving that aside, you have it within your power to satisfy your master without offending God or laying a finger upon me. All you have to do is to take these outer garments I am wearing and leave me a cloak and a doublet. You can then return to our lord and master with the clothes and tell him you have killed me. And I swear to you, upon the life you will have granted me, that I will disappear and go away somewhere so that neither he nor you nor the people of these parts will ever hear of me again.’ The retainer was by no means eager to kill her, and was easily moved to compassion. And so, having taken the clothes, he gave her a tattered old doublet of his and a cloak to put on, left her some money she was carrying, and begged her to disappear entirely from those parts. He then abandoned her in the valley on foot and returned to his master, informing him that not only had his orders been carried out, but he had left her dead body surrounded by a pack of wolves. Some time afterwards, Bernabò returned to Genoa, but once the story had leaked out, he never succeeded in living it down. The lady, abandoned and forlorn, disguised herself as best she could, and when it was dark she went to a nearby cottage, where she obtained some things from an old woman and altered the doublet, shortening it to make it fit. She also converted her shift into a pair of knee-length breeches, cut her hair, and having transformed her appearance completely so that she now looked like a sailor, she made her way down to the coast, where she happened to encounter the master of a ship lying some distance offshore, a Catalan gentleman called Señor En Cararch, who had come ashore at Albenga3 to take on supplies of fresh water. Engaging him in conversation, she persuaded him to sign her on as his cabin-boy, calling herself Sicurano da Finale, and once they had gone aboard, the gentleman supplied her with some smarter clothes to wear. And she served him so well and so efficiently that he grew very attached to her.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  Though my stepfather was a house painter, our house was peeling and appeared ragged and in need of repair. The yard was barren and wild. Our house was noticeably the shabbiest house on the block. I could have taken initiative with the yard, but I always lost energy when I stepped into the aura of the house. I struggled with lethargy and often had to force myself through chores and obligations. I felt a warning in my gut. My stepfather’s car was in the drive. I tried to disarm the knowing. The knowing was a powerful warning system that stepped forth when I was in danger. Still, I often disregarded it. I’d been asked by a boy a few years older than me to go for a walk behind the grounds of the teen recreation center. My knowing said to me in a loud, distinct voice, Do not walk alone with this boy. To do so would put you in danger. I must be imagining things, I said to myself. I walked with him. He knocked me down and attempted to rape me. Someone came on us and I leaped up and got away. The knowing was always right. It could never be disarmed. It stood watch over me. Still, I tried. I told the knowing to remember that my stepfather could be nice sometimes. He sang show tunes to my mother. The knowing didn’t respond. Truth does not lower itself to small-time arguments or skirmishes. But, I argued with myself, you never knew what would happen. He could uncover or invent a transgression of weeks or months before and off would come his belt if he needed an excuse to hit you. Or, once when I thought I would get in trouble for climbing into the space between the ceiling and the roof and falling through into the living room, he just laughed. I hugged my bag under my arm, to protect the play pages. When I opened the door, he stood, smiling, with his belt in his hand. He yanked me into the house, out of view of the neighbors. “This isn’t fair. My mother told me I could go!” I cried as he swung the belt. Because I protested, he hit me for a long time. He grounded me for a month and forbade me to try out for the school play. I had work to do at home. I had to take the bus with everyone else. I didn’t care anymore what happened to me. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] It wasn’t long after that I was invited by a classmate to go to a party. I barely knew her, and I didn’t have a good feeling about her or the situation. But I wanted to go. I wanted to have some semblance of a normal teenage life. I lied to my mother and said I was going to my friend’s house to study for the evening. I didn’t want to lie.

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

  The Christian doctrine of the future life differs from the heathen, and to a less extent also from the Jewish, in the following important points: (a) It gives to the belief in a future state the absolute certainty of divine revelation, sealed by the fact of Christ’s resurrection, and thereby imparts to the present life an immeasurable importance, involving endless issues. (b) It connects the resurrection of the body with the immortality of the soul, and thus gives concrete completion to the latter, and saves the whole individuality of man from destruction. (c) It views death as the punishment of sin, and therefore as something terrible, from which nature shrinks. But its terror has been broken, and its sting extracted by Christ. (d) It qualifies the idea of a future state by the doctrine of sin and redemption, and thus makes it to the believer a state of absolute holiness and happiness, to the impenitent sinner a state of absolute misery. Death and immortality are a blessing to the one, but a terror to the other; the former can hail them with joy; the latter has reason to tremble. (e) It gives great prominence to the general judgment, after the resurrection, which determines the ultimate fate of all men according to their works done in this earthly life. But we must distinguish, in this mysterious article, what is of faith, and what is private opinion and speculation. The return of Christ to judgment with its eternal rewards and punishment is the centre of the eschatological faith of the church. The judgment is preceded by the general resurrection, and followed by life everlasting. This faith is expressed in the oecumenical creeds. The Apostles’ Creed: "He shall come to judge the quick and the dead," and "I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." The Nicene Creed: "He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end." "And we look for the resurrection of the dead, and

• From Trash (1988)

  “The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, and the sense of belief we create from nothing. I used to watch my mama hold off terror with only the edges of her own eyes for a shield, and I still don’t know how she did it. But I am her daughter and have as much muscle in me as she ever did. It’s just that some days I am not strong enough. I stretch myself out a little, and then my own fear pulls me back in. The shaking starts inside. Then I have to stretch myself again. Waxing and waning through my life, maybe I’m building up layers of strength inside. Maybe.” Last night, late, Liz called, asked me to please go out with her for a beer—meet her at the Overpass and talk to her for a few hours. She needed someone to listen to her. Jackie never did anymore, she said. But when we sat down she acted like a stranger, like someone who had come in from out of town and really couldn’t stay long. She was smoking again, Pall Malls out of a hard pack, and lighting them with wooden kitchen matches from a small box. Her red hair looked faded, its dark shine had gone dull and even the blue of her eyes had faded to gray. “It’s wearing me down,” she kept saying. “It’s just fucking wearing me down.” I ordered her a beer and me a glass of wine. When she kept licking her lips and lighting cigarettes one after the other, I started telling her stories. I found myself describing Judy’s hip-grinding routine and the way my new girlfriend Cass would spit in her hand and slide her pool cue up and down while other women took their shots—making both acts equally hilarious and revealing. “Bitches,” Liz pronounced them both. “Like you and me, honey. We’re all pretty bitchy when it comes down to it.” I rubbed my hands in the wine that had trailed down the lip of my glass. “Naw.” She’d downed her beer and signaled for another one. “You and me, we’re the ones they fuck with. We’re something else, taking their shit all the time, their goddamn shit all the time.” I’d sipped my wine and rubbed my neck. “You and Jackie fighting then?” “How’d you guess?” In the dim bar’s lighting, her pale eyes looked charcoal, and she had no smile at all. She was wearing the collar of her dark plaid shirt turned up high against the fringe of her short-cropped hair and she kept pushing up at the back of her head until the hair was standing up stiff and spiky. She looked like one of those desperate women sketched out on the cover of an old Ann Bannon novel, lips and eyes swollen and dark, features all raw and flushed.

• From Trash (1988)

  We are just like her, my sister and I. That March when my sister called, I thought for a moment it was my mama’s voice. The accent was right, and the language—the slow drag of matter-of-fact words and thoughts, but the beaten-down quality wasn’t Mama, couldn’t have been. For a moment I felt as if my hands were gripping old and tender flesh, the skin gone thin from age and wear, my granny’s hands, perhaps, on the day she had stared out at her grandsons and laughed lightly, insisting I take a good look at them. “See, see how the blood thins out.” She spit to the side and clamped a hand down on my shoulder. I turned and looked at her hand, that hand as strong as heavy cord rolled back on itself, my bare shoulder under her hand and the muscles there rising like bubbles in cold milk. I had felt thick and strong beside her, thick and strong and sure of myself in a way I have not felt since. That March when my sister called I felt old; my hands felt wiry and worn, and my blood seemed hot and thin as it rushed through my veins. My sister’s voice sounded hollow; her words vibrated over the phone as if they had iron edges. My tongue locked to my teeth, and I tasted the fear I thought I had put far behind me. “They’re doing everything they can—surgery again this morning and chemotherapy and radiation. He’s a doctor, so he knows, but Jesus ...” “Jesus shit.” “Yeah.” Mama woke up alone with her rage, her grief. “Just what I’d always expected,” she told me later. “You think you know what’s going on, what to expect. You relax a minute and that’s when it happens. Life turns around and kicks you in the butt.” Lying there, she knew they had finally gotten her, the they that had been dogging her all her life, waiting for the chance to rob her of all her tomorrows. Now they had her, her body pinned down under bandages and tubes and sheets that felt like molten lead. She had not really believed it possible. She tried to pull her hands up to her neck, but she couldn’t move her arms. “I was so mad I wanted to kick holes in the sheets, but there wasn’t no use in that.” When my stepfather came in to sit and whistle his sobs beside the bed, she took long breaths and held her face tight and still. She became all eyes, watching everything from a place far off inside herself.

• From Trash (1988)

  My Uncle Matthew used to beat my Aunt Raylene. The twins, Mark and Luke, swore to stop him, pulled him out in the yard one time, throwing him between them like a loose bag of grain. Uncle Matthew screamed like a pig coming up for slaughter. I got both my sisters in the toolshed for safety, but I hung back to watch. Little Bo came running out of the house, off the porch, feetfirst into his daddy’s arms. Uncle Matthew started swinging him like a scythe, going after the bigger boys, Bo’s head thudding their shoulders, their hips. Afterward, Bo crawled around in the dirt, the blood running out of his ears and his tongue hanging out of his mouth, while Mark and Luke finally got their daddy down. It was a long time before I realized that they never told anybody else what had happened to Bo. Randall tried to teach Lucille and me to wrestle. “Put your hands up.” His legs were wide apart, his torso bobbing up and down, his head moving constantly. Then his hand flashed at my face. I threw myself back into the dirt, lay still. He turned to Lucille, not noticing that I didn’t get up. He punched at her, laughing. She wrapped her hands around her head, curled over so her knees were up against her throat. “No, no!” he yelled. “Move like her.” He turned to me. “Move.” He kicked at me. I rocked into a ball, froze. “No, no!” He kicked me. I grunted, didn’t move. He turned to Lucille. “You.” Her teeth were chattering but she held herself still, wrapped up tighter than bacon slices. “You move!” he shouted. Lucille just hugged her head tighter and started to sob. “Son of a bitch,” Randall grumbled, “you two will never be any good.” He walked away. Very slowly we stood up, embarrassed, looked at each other. We knew. If you fight back, they kill you. My sister was seven. She was screaming. My stepfather picked her up by her left arm, swung her forward and back. It gave. The arm went around loosely. She just kept screaming. I didn’t know you could break it like that. I was running up the hall. He was right behind me. “Mama! Mama!” His left hand—he was left-handed—closed around my throat, pushed me against the wall, and then he lifted me that way. I kicked, but I couldn’t reach him. He was yelling, but there was so much noise in my ears I couldn’t hear him. “Please, Daddy. Please, Daddy. I’ll do anything, I promise. Daddy, anything you want. Please, Daddy.” I couldn’t have said that. I couldn’t talk around that fist at my throat, couldn’t breathe. I woke up when I hit the floor. I looked up at him. “If I live long enough, I’ll fucking kill you.” He picked me up by my throat again. “What’s wrong with her?” “Why’s she always following you around?” Nobody really wanted answers.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I was dying even as I was being born. This continues to be a theme in my life, this struggle with transitions: between night and day, here and there, desert and water, earth and sky, and beginnings and endings. As I was being born, I had the same dying, gulping breaths as my father’s last breaths when he died several years later, in a small Texas town near the water. We are linked by water and fire. My father and I surfaced in an ancient memory once when I was in my thirties. We lived by the water near a volcano. We who lived there had a long relationship with the spirit of the volcano. Our behavior broke the trust. We littered the land with trash and discord. We forgot to acknowledge the gifts. The volcano mountain blew with a terrible pressure. The earth rocked and fell open. Lava the color of fiery blood streamed toward us. Fire and ash rained down. We panicked for air. The man who was now my father and I stumbled to the sea with our lungs on fire. I was his companion, friend, not the daughter I was to be in this life, this story. Many others rushed toward the sea to get away from the raining fire. We fell into a boat docked near shore, as did many others, more than the boat could carry. We attempted to move away from the falling ash, into the ocean, which was moving oddly in the disturbance. Hundreds were jumping into the water, clinging to the boat. I lost earth consciousness. One version of the Mvskoke creation story begins with a volcano. It marked our journey from a place in the west. Sam Proctor, the helis heya or medicine maker of my tribal town, told me that in that time seven Hawaiian canoes came to shore. Those people became part of us. We walked east to more stable lands. A compassionate fire appeared before us to guide us. We made it to what is now known as the southeastern part of the United States. Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts. My guardian remains, and reminds me of those older generations of Creek people who stayed close to the teachings, like my cousin John Jacobs of Holdenville, my beloved aunt Lois Harjo Ball, and George and Stella Coser, Sr. They speak softly, with kindness. They are quick with humor, and keep an open path. They have been tested with suffering and have responded with wisdom rather than bitterness. They teach by story, images, and songs. And they are respectful to mystery. They continue to remind me that it is best to walk this earthly path with vnektckv , compassion. All I have to do is remember them, and they stand in memory in a kind light.

• From Trash (1988)

  When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes. I was too young to imagine my own death with anything but an adolescent’s high romantic enjoyment; I pretended often enough that I was dying of a wasting disease that would give lots of time for my aunts, uncles, and stepfather to mourn me. But the idea that anything could touch my mother, that anything would dare to hurt her, was impossible to bear, and I woke up screaming the one night I dreamed of her death—a dream in which I tried bodily to climb to the throne of a Baptist god and demand her return to me. I thought of my mama like a mountain or a cave, a force of nature, a woman who had saved her own life and mine, and would surely save us both over and over again. The wrinkles in her hands made me think of earthquakes and the lines under her eyes hummed of tidal waves in the night. If she was fragile, if she was human, then so was I, and anything might happen. If she were not the backbone of creation itself, then fear would overtake me. I could not allow that, would not. My child’s solution was to try to cure my mother of wrinkles in the hope of saving her from death itself. [image file=image_408.jpg] Once, when I was about eight and there was no Jergens lotion to be had, I spooned some mayonnaise out to use instead. Mama leaned forward, sniffed, lay back, and laughed into her hand. “If that worked,” she told me, still grinning, “I wouldn’t have dried up to begin with—all the mayonnaise I’ve eaten in my life.” “All the mayonnaise you’ve spread—like the butter of your smile, out there for everybody,” my stepfather grumbled. He wanted his evening glass of tea, wanted his feet put up, and maybe his neck rubbed. At a look from Mama, I’d run one errand after another until he was settled with nothing left to complain about. Then I’d go back to Mama. But by that time we’d have to start on dinner, and I wouldn’t have any more quiet time with her till a day or two later when I’d rub her feet again.

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

  The first part exhorts unbelievers to repent in view of the impending end of the world, and gives prominence to chiliastic ideas about Antichrist, the return of the Twelve Tribes, the first resurrection, the millennium, and the last judgment. The second part exhorts catechumens and various classes of Christians. The last acrostic which again reminds the reader of the end of the world, is entitled "Nomen Gazaei,"1570 and, if read backwards, gives the name of the author: Commodianus mendicus Christi.1571 2. The second work which was only brought to light in 1852, is an "Apologetic Poem against Jews and Gentiles," and was written about 249. It exhorts them (like the first part of the "Instructions" to repent without delay in view of the approaching end of the world. It is likewise written in uncouth hexameters and discusses in 47 sections the doctrine of God, of man, and of the Redeemer (vers. 89–275); the meaning of the names of Son and Father in the economy of salvation (276–573); the obstacles to the progress of Christianity(574–611); it warns Jews and Gentiles to forsake their religion (612–783), and gives a description of the last things (784–1053). The most interesting part of this second poem is the conclusion. It contains a fuller description of Antichrist than the first poem. The author expects that the end of the world will soon come with the seventh persecution; the Goths will conquer Rome and redeem the Christians; but then Nero will appear as the heathen Antichrist, reconquer Rome, and rage against the Christians three years and a-half; he will be conquered in turn by the Jewish and real Antichrist from the east, who after the defeat of Nero and the burning of Rome will return to Judaea, perform false miracles, and be worshipped by the Jews. At last Christ appears, that is God himself (from the Monarchian standpoint of the author), with the lost Twelve Tribes as his army, which had lived beyond Persia in happy simplicity and virtue; under astounding phenomena of nature he will conquer Antichrist and his host, convert all nations and take possession of the holy city of Jerusalem. The concluding description of the judgment is preserved only in broken fragments. The idea of a double Antichrist is derived from the two beasts of the Apocalypse, and combines the Jewish conception of the Antimessiah, and the heathen Nero-legend. But the remarkable feature is that the second Antichrist is represented as a Jew and as defeating the heathen Nero, as he will be defeated by Christ. The same idea of a double antichrist appears in Lactantius.1572 § 202. Arnobius. (I.) Arnobii (oratoris) adversus Nationes (or Gentes) libri septem. Best ed. by Reifferscheid, Vindob. 1875. (vol. IV. of the "Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum," issued by the Academy of Vienna.) Other editions: by Faustus Sabaeus, Florence 1543 (ed. princeps); Bas. (Frobenius) 1546; Paris 1580, 1666, 1715; Antw. 1582; Rom. 1583; Genev. 1597; Lugd. Bat. 1598, 165l; by Orelli, Lips. 1816; Hildebrand, Halle, 1844; Migne, "Patrol.

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

  At the earnest solicitation of the papal nuncio, the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and the Dukes William and Louis of Bavaria, together with twelve bishops of South Germany, concluded at Ratisbon, July 6, 1524, a league for the protection of the Roman faith against the Reformation, with the exception of the abolition of some glaring abuses which did not touch doctrines.501 The Emperor lent it his influence by issuing a stringent edict (July 27, 1524). This was an ominous event. The Romish league called forth a Protestant counter-league of Philip of Hesse and John of Saxony, at Torgau in June, 1526, although against the advice of the Wittenberg Reformers, who feared more evil than good from a union of politics with religion and trusted to the power of the Word of God without any carnal weapons. Thus the German nation was divided into two hostile camps. From this unhappy division arose the political weakness of the empire, and the terrible calamities of the Smalkaldian and the Thirty Years’ Wars. In 1525 the Peasants’ War broke out, and gave new strength to the reaction, but only for a short time. § 70. Luther and Henry VIII Henricus VIII.: Adsertio VII. Sacram. adv. Luth. Lond. 1521. A German translation by Frick, 1522, in Walch, XIX., 158 sqq. Lutherus: Contra Henricum Regem. 1522. Also freely reproduced in German by Luther. His letter to Henry, Sept. 1, 1525. Auf des Königs in England Lästerschrift M. Luther’s Antwort. 1527. Afterwards also in Latin. See the documents in Walch, XIX. 153–521; Erl. ed., XXVIII. 343 sqq.; XXX. 1–14. Comp. also Luther’s letters of Feb. 4 and March 11, 1527, in De Wette III. 161 and 163. With all his opposition to Ultra-Protestantism in church and state, Luther did not mean to yield an inch to the Romanists. This appears from two very personal controversies which took place during these disturbances,—the one with Henry VIII. concerning the sacraments; the other with Erasmus about predestination and free-will. In both he forgot the admirable lessons of moderation which he had enjoined from the pulpit in Wittenberg. He used again the club of Hercules. Henry VIII. of England urged Charles V. to exterminate the Lutheran heresy by force, and wrote in 1521 (probably with the assistance of his chaplain, Edward Lee), a scholastic defence of the seven sacraments, against Luther’s "Babylonish Captivity." He dedicated the book to Pope Leo X. He treated the Reformer with the utmost contempt, as a blasphemer and servant of Satan. He used the old weapons of church authority against freedom. He adhered to the dogma of transubstantiation, even after his breach with Rome. Pope Clement VII. judged that this book was written with the aid of the Holy Spirit, and promised indulgence to all who read it. At the same time he gratified the ambition of the vain king by confirming the title "Defender of the Faith," which Leo had already conferred upon him.502

• From Trash (1988)

  Those wide blank eyes looked back at me. I could see myself in the black centers, my hair wild and uncombed around my face, my own eyes as wide as the monkey’s, as blank, the pupils as black and empty as night. My mouth worked, and in the blackness I saw my own teeth—clenching, shining, grinding. My teeth scared me right down into my soul. I stole all the dimes from the petty cash drawer and called Toni from the pay phone in the dorm. She listened to me babble and made soft soothing noises into my ears. “It’s all right, baby. I understand. Don’t none of us want to be too alone if we can help it, now and then.” I put the phone tight to my teeth and sobbed until she yelled to make me stop. “If now and then is all you got to offer, then we’ll see about now and then.” The last Sunday before we all went away for the summer, Toni borrowed a few hours’ time from a friend with an apartment in town. I’d quit my job in the lab and taken another in the post office, signed up for computer class, and was trying to stop dreaming about plush-faced monkeys and wild red rats. Toni and I made love until we were too sore to move and then lay naked, sweating into each other’s hips. Toni held my hands, fingering the two scars that remained on my right little finger. After a few minutes she sucked my fingers into her mouth and bit down gently. “Tell me about that fishing camp again.” I could barely understand her, and didn’t want to talk anyway. “No.” “That monkey left her mark on you, didn’t she?” “Only one that ever did.” I looked into her eyes when I said it, knowing what I was saying as much as she did. “Only one, huh? You think that’s just?” I shrugged, my eyes never leaving hers. “There is no justice,” I told her, meaning it, meaning it absolutely. Toni sighed and rolled over. She took a long pull from the half-empty glass of beer she’d left on the floor, and then looked up at me from under her eyebrows. “Tell you what,” she whispered. “I want you to put me in one of your stories sometime.” I took the glass away from her, took a drink myself. “What in the world for?” She took the glass back and turned away from me. “I want to be there,” she said over her shoulder. “I just want to be there, right in there with the monkeys. Me, you understand—raw and drunk and hairy. Me, the way I am. You put me in there, huh? You just put me in there.” Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know

• From Trash (1988)

  But a night finally came when I woke up sweaty and angry and afraid I’d never go back to sleep again. All those stories were rising up my throat. Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be. But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make something—by God just once—to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense. I got up and wrote a story all the way through. It was one of the stories from the yellow pages, one of the ones I had rewritten, but it was different again. It wasn’t truly me or my mama or my girlfriends, or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life. It wasn’t that whiny voice, but it had the drawl, and it had, too, the joy and pride I sometimes felt in me and mine. It was not biography and yet not lies, and it resonated to the pulse of my sisters’ fear and my desperate shame, and it ended with all the questions and decisions still waiting—most of all the decision to live. It was a rough beginning—my own shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion. It was most of all my deep abiding desire to live fleshed and strengthened on the page, a way to tell the truth as a kind of magic not cheapened or distorted by a need to please any damn body at all. Without it, I cannot imagine my own life. Without it, I have no way to know who I am. One time, twice, once in a while again, I get it right. Once in a while, I can make the world I know real on the page. I can make the women and men I love breathe out loud in an empty room, the dreams I dare not speak shape up in the smoky darkness of other people’s imaginations. Writing these stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration. I write stories. I write fiction. I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life—the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed, working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine. River of Names

• From Trash (1988)

  Jo was wrong about that, though as it turned out we were both grateful she got me to come. Arlene came close to putting out the eye of the orderly who tried to help the nurses strap her down. She did break his nose, and chipped two teeth that belonged to the rent-a-cop who came over to play hero. The nurses fared better, getting away with only a few scratches and one moderately unpleasant bite mark. “I’ll kill you,” Arlene kept screaming. “I’ll fucking kill you all!” Then after a while, “You’re killing me. You’re killing me!” It was Jo who had found Arlene. Baby sister had barely been breathing, her face and hair sour with vomit. Jo called the ambulance, and then poured cold water all over Arlene’s head and shoulders until she became conscious enough to scream. For a day and a half, Jo told me, Arlene was finally who she should have been from the beginning. She cursed with outrage and flailed with wild conviction. “You should have seen it,” Jo told me. By the time I got there, Arlene was going in and out—one minute sobbing and weak and the next minute rearing up to shout. The conviction was just about gone. When she was quiet for a little while, I looked in at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Every breath Arlene drew seemed to suck oxygen out of the room. Then Jack came in the door and it was as if she caught fire at the sight of him. For the first and only time in her life she called him a son of a bitch to his face. “You, you,” she screamed. “You are killing me! Get out. Get out. I’ll rip your dick off if you don’t get the hell out of here.” “She’s gone completely crazy,” Jack told everyone, but it sounded like sanity to me. The psychiatric nurse kept pushing for sedation, but Jo and I fought them on that. Let her scream it out, we insisted. By some miracle they listened to us, and left her alone. We stayed in the hall outside the room, listening to Arlene as she slowly wound herself down. “I did the best I could,” Jack kept saying to the doctor. “You can see what it was like. I just never knew what to do.” Jo and I kept our distance. Neither of us said a word. By the third morning, Arlene was gray-faced and repentant. When we went in to check on her, her eyes would not rise to meet ours. “I’m all right,” she said in a thick hoarse whisper. “And I won’t ever let that happen again.” “Damn pity,” Jo told me later. “That was just about the only time I’ve ever really liked her. Crazy out of her mind, she made sense. Sane, I don’t understand her at all.” “What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked me.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But as luck would have it, the sea was struck by a sudden squall, which sent the chest hurtling into Landolfo’s spar, upending it and inevitably causing Landolfo to lose his grip and go under. When he re-surfaced, he found that he was some distance away from the spar, and was afraid that he would never reach it, for he was exhausted and only his panic was keeping him afloat. He therefore made for the chest, which was quite close at hand, and dragging himself up on its lid, he sprawled across it and held it steady with his arms. And in this fashion, buffeted this way and that by the sea, with nothing to eat and far more to drink than he would have wished, not knowing where he was and seeing nothing but water, he survived for the whole of that day and the following night. By the next day, Landolfo had almost turned into a sponge when, either through the will of God or the power of the wind, he arrived off the coast of the island of Corfu. Clinging grimly to the edges of the chest with both hands, just as we see a man in danger of drowning attaching himself firmly to anything within reach, he was sighted by a peasant woman, who happened to be scouring and polishing her pots and pans in the sand and salt-water.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I cried in pain, in fear of the thoughts stabbing my parents’ minds: She could be crippled the rest of her life. She could die. My father didn’t know what to do. He knew how to fix the car or his truck. He didn’t know how to fix me, his baby girl. After hanging up with the doctor, my mother announced: “We have to take her to the hospital, now.” My father left my side to get the car keys. A neighbor who agreed to stay with my baby brother took instructions from my mother as she tightly rolled up my shivering body in a blanket. I had the chills, and for a moment the chatter of my teeth distracted me. They made a rhythm. The rhythm pleased me. My father carried me to the car to take me to the hospital. Polio was epidemic in the country. It caused paralysis and killed. My parents, the doctor, and the neighbor were frightened. I had entered a world in which everyone spoke softly, with trepidation, as if the sound of the word polio would call it into the house. In my parents’ tribal traditions, the word, if spoken with intent, could call it here. The hospital was a house of strangers. I was undressed and put in a gown, a diaper, and a crib. Not only was I sick, my status had dropped from girl to baby. My parents watched helplessly from a distance. The transfer of power confused me. In this realm my parents were no longer the presiding gods. A nurse in white carried me to a bare room for a spinal tap. I knew it was going to be bad when three people in uniforms came into the room to hold me down. I screamed as a needle went in. The spinal column carries personal essence back and forth between earth and sky. The spine is powerful and vulnerable. The procedure was excruciating. I flailed as much with the fear as with the pain. Worse, I saw my mother’s face across the room as it broke apart with my suffering. I didn’t see my father there. He was standing out in the hallway, smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette. I can still hear the kind voice of a nurse attempting to reassure me by lying to me. “It won’t hurt too much. It will be over soon.” My parents gave me a white stuffed cat, then reluctantly left at the end of visiting hours. I was bereft. The toy didn’t replace my parents, but I needed that token of their love. And I liked cats. My father was of the Tiger clan through his mother. This gave us a special connection with cats. Some of our family understand and speak cat language. Aunt Lois said her father had a black cat he fed special treats from the table. She said she told her father that he loved the cat more than her.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  My mother awakened me from the floor of the closet where I had fallen asleep. I was dreaming I was with my father in his boat at the lake. We couldn’t move through the water because the lake was frozen. I was getting cold. “It’s snowing, baby,” my mother whispered to me as she carried me to the window. My little brother was asleep, curled up on his cot. He looked like one of the delicate angel ornaments. Baby was sucking her hand as she dreamed and appeared to float in her bassinet. There was still no tree, no father. I felt bad about everything. “I’m sorry, Mama.” “Shush,” she cooed as she wiped the window free of frost. “Look at all the snow.” We looked out together into the shining world. There was magic in the whirling pictures the snow made. In the distance I imagined my father dragging home a tree taller than the house. He called out to my mother and me to open the door as he hefted the trunk to his shoulder to bring it back home in time for Christmas. I was four years old when I woke up with muscle stiffness, headache, and nausea—all the symptoms of polio. The o’s of the word polio rolled through my mouth like a game of catch. The word sent hushed fear through the voices of my parents as they moved about me, attempting to alleviate my symptoms. My body was a hurting thing. Though I tried, I could not leave my body by will. I heard my mother on the phone with the doctor, her fear tensing the mother- cord between us. I cried in pain, in fear of the thoughts stabbing my parents’ minds: She could be crippled the rest of her life. She could die. My father didn’t know what to do. He knew how to fix the car or his truck. He didn’t know how to fix me, his baby girl. After hanging up with the doctor, my mother announced: “We have to take her to the hospital, now.” My father left my side to get the car keys. A neighbor who agreed to stay with my baby brother took instructions from my mother as she tightly rolled up my shivering body in a blanket.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  My grandmother used to dream stories as long as novels, said my mother. She used them to get the children into bed at night. They were thrilling and dramatic. She was skillful at timing, ending each episode at a critical juncture so the children were kept in suspense until the next night. My mother says she would think of the story all day long, eager for bedtime. It was a major undertaking to get seven children—six boys and one girl—tucked in at night. If they cooperated, they were rewarded with the next segment in the serial. I can see them lined up together on the floor, wrapped in their pallets of handed-down blankets and quilts in the abandoned two-story house they lived in one winter when the family was destitute. No one else would go near the house, much less live in it, because the house was haunted. The family had no place else to go, and my mother’s father was away working on the railroad. My mother remembers wandering far to gather firewood. It was record- breaking cold that winter and most of the wood nearby had been picked off. To keep warm, the family blocked off most of the rest of the house and stayed in the room with the fireplace. Every night the ghosts of the house would assemble for the party upstairs. My mother said she’d hear the tinkling keys of an old-time piano. Then she would hear the shuffle and slap of the deal of the cards, and the sighs and exclamations of the card players. The same party went on every night. The voices would start at a low, conversational rumble and then build as the night went on and they had more to drink, until a fight would break out. Then someone would fire a gunshot, and then the family would hear the strange bump of a dead body being dragged down the stairs. My mother said it terrified her, no matter how many times it happened. In one story that hides out in the corner of family memory, a man comes home from working on the railroad all winter. It was a rough winter made by swinging a hammer through wind, ice, and rain. He carefully saves money for his family, though he does succumb to a few trips into town to gamble and drink with his friends, to see a woman. He’s not a drinker or gambler by nature. He can take it or leave it. He has seven children at home. When he returns with enough cash to rent a place, buy new shoes for everyone and food, he discovers his wife is pregnant with a baby that is not his child. He beats her in a rage. She miscarries the child. Then he drags her into the path of an oncoming train and holds her

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Meanwhile, the ship itself, though torn open and almost waterlogged, was driven swiftly along by powerful winds until eventually it ran aground on a beach on the island of Majorca. By this time, the only people still aboard were the lady and her female attendants, and they were all lying there like dead creatures, paralysed with terror by the raging tempest. The ship’s impetus was so great that it thrust its way firmly into the sand before coming to rest a there stone’s throw from the shore, and since the wind was no longer able to move it, there it remained for the rest of the night, to be pounded by the sea. By the time it was broad daylight, the storm had abated considerably, and the lady, who was feeling practically half-dead, raised her head and began, weak as she was, to call out to her servants one after another. But it was all to no purpose, because they were too far away to hear. On receiving no response and seeing nobody about, she wondered what on earth had happened, and began to be filled with considerable alarm. She staggered to her feet to discover that her maids of honour and the other women were lying about all over the ship, and she attempted to rouse each of them in turn by calling to them at the top of her voice. But few of them showed any signs of life because they had all been laid low by their terror and the heavings of their stomachs, and her own fears were accordingly increased. Nevertheless, since she was all alone and possessed no idea of her whereabouts, she felt in need of someone to talk to, and so she went round prodding the ones who were still alive and forced them to their feet, only to discover that none of them had any idea what had happened to all the men aboard. And when they saw that the ship was aground and full of water, they all started crying as though they would burst.