Grief

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 Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  It drove Mom crazy, and it was the reason she never set rules for us. But I loved Grandma Smith. She was a tall, leathery, broad-shouldered woman with green eyes and a strong jaw. She told me I was her favorite grandchild and that I was going to grow up to be something special. I even liked all of her rules. I liked how she woke us up every morning at dawn, shouting, “Rise and shine, everybody!” and insisted we wash our hands and comb our hair before eating breakfast. She made us hot Cream of Wheat with real butter, then oversaw us while we cleared the table and washed the dishes. Afterward, she took us all to buy new clothes, and we’d go to a movie like Mary Poppins . Now, on the way to Phoenix, I stood up in the back of the car and leaned over the front seat between Mom and Dad. “Are we going to go stay with Grandma?” I asked. “No,” Mom said. She looked out the window, but not at anything in particular. Then she said, “Grandma’s dead.” “What?” I asked. I’d heard her, but I was so thrown I felt like I hadn’t. Mom repeated herself, still looking out the window. I glanced back at Lori and Brian, but they were sleeping. Dad was smoking, his eyes on the road. I couldn’t believe I’d been sitting there thinking of Grandma Smith, looking forward to eating Cream of Wheat and having her comb my hair and cuss, and all along she’d been dead. I started hitting Mom on the shoulder, hard, and asking why she hadn’t told us. Finally, Dad held down my fists with his free hand, the other holding both his cigarette and the steering wheel, and said, “That’s enough, Mountain Goat.” Mom seemed surprised that I was so upset. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “There didn’t seem any point,” she said. “What happened?” Grandma had been only in her sixties, and most people in her family lived until they were about a hundred. The doctors said she’d died from leukemia, but Mom thought it was radioactive poisoning. The government was always testing nuclear bombs in the desert near the ranch, Mom said. She and Jim used to go out with a Geiger counter and find rocks that ticked. They stored them in the basement and used some to make jewelry for Grandma. “There’s no reason to grieve,” Mom said. “We’ve all got to go someday, and Grandma had a life that was longer and fuller than most.” She paused. “And now we have a place to live.” Mom explained that Grandma Smith had owned two houses, the one she lived in with the green shutters and French doors, and an older house, made of adobe, in downtown Phoenix. Since Mom was the older of the two children, Grandma Smith had asked her which house she wanted to inherit.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  This is not verbatim. I was a little edgy for the next six weeks, as you can imagine. I had lots and lots of drinks every night, and told lots of strangers at the bar about how my dad had died and I’d written this book about it, and how the early reviewers had criticized it, and then I’d start to cry and need a few more drinks, and then I’d end up telling them about this great dog we’d had named Llewelyn who had to be put to sleep when I was twelve, which still made me so sad even to think about, I’d tell my audience, that it was all I could do not to go into the rest room and blow my brains out. Then the book came out. I got some terrific reviews in important places, and a few bad ones. There were a few book-signing parties, a few interviews, and a number of important people claimed to love it. But overall it seemed that I was not in fact going to be taking early retirement. I had secretly believed that trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity. And this is what I thought when my second book came out, and my third, and my fourth, and my fifth. And each time I was wrong. But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  antimetaphorical precisely because it maintains the loss as radically unnameable; in other words, incorporation is not only a failure to name or avow the loss, but erodes the conditions of metaphorical signification itself. As in the Lacanian perspective, for Abraham and Torok the repudiation of the maternal body is the condition of signification within the Symbolic. They argue further that this primary repression founds the possibility of individuation and of significant speech, where speech is necessarily metaphorical, in the sense that the referent, the object of desire, is a perpetual displacement. In effect, the loss of the maternal body as an object of love is understood to establish the empty space out of which words originate. But the refusal of this loss—melancholy—results in the failure to displace into words; indeed, the place of the maternal body is established in the body, “encrypted,” to use their term, and given permanent residence there as a dead and deadening part of the body or one inhabited or possessed by phantasms of various kinds. When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose “incorporation” as the manner by which that identification is accomplished. Indeed, according to the scheme above, gender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body and that determines, in effect, the living versus the dead body. As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth. The localization and/or prohibition of pleasures and desires in given “erotogenic” zones is precisely the kind of gender-differentiating melancholy that suffuses the body’s surface. The loss of the pleasurable object is resolved through the incorporation of that very pleasure with the result that pleasure is both determined and prohibited through the compulsory effects of the gender-differentiating law. The incest taboo is, of course, more inclusive than the taboo against homosexuality, but in the case of the heterosexual incest taboo through which heterosexual identity is established, the loss is borne as grief. In the case of the prohibition against homosexual incest through which heterosexual identity is established, however, the loss is sustained through a melancholic structure. The loss of the heterosexual object, argues Freud, results in the displacement of that object, but not the heterosexual aim; on the other hand, the loss of the homosexual object requires the loss of the aim and the object. In other words, the object is not only lost, but the desire fully denied, such that “I never lost that person and I never loved that person, indeed never felt that kind of love at all.” The melancholic preservation of that love is all the more securely safeguarded through the totalizing trajectory of the denial.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  desperation? She was the last one to see her. Surely she could have done something. She dissolves into tears. She cries the way she did when she left Caitlin the morning after her seventeenth birthday. She cries the way she did driving back from Santa Fe with Bru, great gut-wrenching sobs, until there’s nothing left. Finally, she lies beside the stone and sleeps. When she awakens she’s thirsty. Her breasts are full, her nipples are beginning to leak. She has to get back for Nate’s feeding. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a pure white beach stone. She places it atop Caitlin’s stone. “The next time I see you I get to ask the questions,” she tells her. Then she laughs. She laughs thinking of Caitlin listening to her, blathering about friendship and love. Sometimes Vix thinks when the Big Four-O comes along she’ll get an envelope from some exotic place and inside will be an airline ticket and a note—Come celebrate with me. Gus will say, “Go ... don’t worry about the kids.” So she’ll go. Caitlin will meet her at the airport, her hair flying in the wind. After they hug Vix will hold Caitlin at arm’s length for a minute. God, Caitlin, she’ll say, You look so ... grownup. And Caitlin will laugh and answer, It’s about time, don’t you think? To Mary Weaver my “summer sister” WITH MANY THANKS to Randy Blume, Larry Blume, Amanda Cooper, and their friends for talking with me about music and memories during long, leisurely Vineyard dinners on the porch. Special thanks to Kate Schaum, dedicated early reader, and to Gloria DeAngelis, Kaethe Fine, and Robin Standefer. Also, to my Harvard connections, Nicky Weinstock, Ted Rose, and Seng Dao Yang (my unofficial guide to Weld South). JUDY BLUME’S BOOKS FOR ADULT READERS Wifey Smart Women Summer Sisters FOR YOUNG ADULTS Tiger Eyes Forever ... Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You Places I Never Meant to Be (editor) FOR YOUNGER READERS, THE “FUDGE” BOOKS Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great Superfudge Fudge-a-mania Double Fudge FOR MIDDLE GRADE READERS Iggie’s House Blubber Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t It’s Not the End of the World Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself Deenie Just as Long as We’re Together Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson PICTURE BOOKS The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo The Pain and the Great One Freckle Juice THE “PAIN & THE GREAT ONE” SERIES Soupy Saturdays with the Pain & the Great One Cool Zone with the Pain & the Great One Going, Going, Gone! with the Pain & the Great One Friend or Fiend? with the Pain & the Great One

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She had picked out all the hymns and prayers, chosen her favorite funeral home, ordered a lavender lace nightgown from JCPenney that she wanted to be buried in, and selected a two-toned lavender casket with shiny chrome handles from the mortician’s catalog. Erma’s death brought out Mom’s pious side. While we were waiting for the preacher, she took out her rosary and prayed for Erma’s soul, which she feared was in jeopardy since, as she saw it, Erma had committed suicide. She also tried to make us kiss Erma’s corpse. We flat out refused, but Mom went up in front of the mourners, genuflected with a grand sweep, and then kissed Erma’s cheek so vigorously that you could hear the puckering sound throughout the chapel. I was sitting next to Dad. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen him wearing a necktie, which he always called a noose. His face was tight and closed, but I could tell he was distraught. More distraught than I’d ever seen him, which surprised me, because Erma had seemed to have some sort of an evil hold over Dad, and I thought he’d be relieved to be free of it. As we walked home, Mom asked us kids if we had anything nice to say about Erma now that she had passed. We took a couple of steps in silence, then Lori said, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” Brian and I started snickering. Dad wheeled around and gave Lori such a cold, angry look that I thought he might wallop her. “She was my mother, for God’s sake,” he said. He glared at us. “You kids. You make me ashamed. Do you hear me? Ashamed!” He turned down the street to Junior’s bar. We all watched him go. “You’re ashamed of us ?” Lori called after him. Dad just kept walking. • • • Four days later, when Dad still hadn’t come home, Mom sent me to go find him. “Why do I always have to get Dad?” I asked. “Because he likes you the best,” she said. “And he’ll come home if you tell him to.” The first step in tracking down Dad was going next door to the Freemans, who let us use their phone if we paid a dime, and calling Grandpa to ask if Dad was there. Grandpa said he had no idea where Dad was. “When y’all gonna get your own telephone?” Mr. Freeman asked after I hung up. “Mom disapproves of telephones,” I said as I placed the dime on his coffee table. “She thinks they’re an impersonal means of communication.” My first stop, as always, was Junior’s. It was the fanciest bar in Welch, with a picture window, a grill that served hamburgers and french fries, and a pinball machine. “Hey!” one of the regulars called out when I walked in. “It’s Rex’s little girl. How ya doin’, sweetheart?” “I’m fine, thank you.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  At the beginning of the narrative, s/he offers two one-sentence paragraphs “parallel” to one another which suggest a melancholic incorporation of the lost father, a postponement of the anger of abandonment through the structural instatement of that negativity into h/er identity and desire. Before s/he tells us that s/he h/erself was abandoned by h/er mother quickly and without advance notice, s/he tells us that for reasons unstated s/he spent a few years in a house for abandoned and orphaned children. S/he refers to the “poor creatures, deprived from their cradle of a mother’s love.” In the next sentence s/he refers to this institution as a “refuge [asile] of suffering and affliction,” and in the following sentence refers to h/er father “whom a sudden death tore away … from the tender affection of my mother” (4). Although h/er own abandonment is twice deflected here through the pity for others who are suddenly rendered motherless, s/he establishes an identification through that deflection, one that later reappears as the joint plight of father and daughter cut off from the maternal caress. The deflections of desire are semantically compounded, as it were, as Herculine proceeds to fall in love with “mother” after “mother” and then falls in love with various mothers’ “daughters,” which scandalizes all manner of mother. Indeed, s/he vacillates between being the object of everyone’s adoration and excitement and an object of scorn and abandonment, the split consequence of a melancholic structure left to feed on itself without intervention. If melancholy involves self-recrimination, as Freud argues, and if that recrimination is a kind of negative narcissism (attending to the self, even if only in the mode of berating that self), then Herculine can be understood to be constantly falling into the opposition between negative and positive narcissism, at once avowing h/erself as the most abandoned and neglected creature on earth but also as the one who casts a spell of enchantment on everyone who comes near h/er, indeed, one who is better for all women than any “man” (107).

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There was a fox, tipped with black from head to toe, who was a very model of slyness and iniquity. He had dwelled in a forest, near the old woman’s cottage, for three years. The previous night, as high fortune had dictated, the fox burst through the hedge that protected the yard where Chanticleer and his wives were accustomed to take the air. He lay concealed in a bed of cabbages until the following morning, ready to seize the proud cock at the first opportunity. That is what assassins do, when they are waiting for their prey. They hide, and they plot. Oh false murderer, lying among the cabbages! You are no better than Judas Iscariot. You are worse than Genylon, who betrayed brave Roland. You false traitor. You are another Synon, who caused the wooden horse to be brought into Troy. Oh Chanticleer you will curse the morning when you flew down from your perch. You were forewarned in your dreams that this day would be hurtful to you, but you spread your wings none the less. Well, as some wise clerks say, what will be will be. God has made it so. There is much debate and argument on the point, among the schoolmen. Thousands of them have disputed on the claims of free will and necessity. I really don’t have the wit to solve the conundrum. Augustine has tried. Boethius has tried. Thomas Bradwardyn has tried. Remember him? There are those who believe that all is predestined and prejudged in the fathomless mind of God. But there are others who distinguish between providence and destiny. It is not necessary that things happen because they have been ordained but, rather, things that do happen have indeed been ordained. It is too much for me. I am telling a tale of a cock and a fox. That is all. I am relating the sad story of a bird that was persuaded by his wife to ignore his dream and to strut around the farmyard. The advice of women is often fatal. It was a woman’s advice that led to all our woe. I am talking about Eve, who advised Adam out of Paradise. He had been happy there. If I have offended anyone among you, dear pilgrims, take it in good spirit. I am only joking. Consult the authors who know about such things. Read what they have written about women. In any case these are the words of the cock. They are not mine. I mean no harm to any female.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The conflation of desire with the real—that is, the belief that it is parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire—is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy characteristic of the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality. The disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex. Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, “forgets” the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality. In the case of the melancholic heterosexual male, he never loved another man, he is a man, and he can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will prove it. But the literalization of anatomy not only proves nothing, but is a literalizing restriction of pleasure in the very organ that is championed as the sign of masculine identity. The love for the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task. Indeed, the woman-as-object must be the sign that he not only never felt homosexual desire, but never felt the grief over its loss. Indeed, the woman-as-sign must effectively displace and conceal that preheterosexual history in favor of one that consecrates a seamless heterosexuality.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So she begged him to take up his sword and slay her softly. Then once more she fainted away. With sorrowful heart Virginius picked up his sword and cut off her head with one stroke. Then, according to the story, he picked it up by the hair and took it to the courtoom. There he laid it on the judge’s table. When Appius saw it, he ordered Virginius to be hanged immediately. But a thousand people gathered, in sorrow and pity for the knight. All of them knew, or suspected, that the judge had twisted and broken the law. They had noted the false demeanour of the churl Claudius, who had brought the charges. In any case, Appius was a notorious lecher. No one trusted him. So they marched against him, charged him, and threw him into prison; he killed himself in his cell. Claudius was sentenced to death by hanging, from the nearest tree, but Virginius pleaded his case so well that the churl was instead sent into exile. That is pity for you. Otherwise the villain would have died. All the other guilty parties were taken and executed immediately. This is how sin is repaid. We must all take heed. No one knows the course of God’s will. No one knows how, or where, He will strike. The worm of conscience may be nourished by a wicked life, and then bite. However secret, however well hidden, vice will get its reward. The simple man and the scholar have this in common: they do not know the time or the nature of their departure from this life. So be warned. Give up sin, before sin gives up you. Heere endeth the Phisiciens Tale The Pardoner’s Prologue Heere folweth the Prologe of the Pardoners Tale Our Host began to swear as if he had gone crazy. ‘My God!’ he shouted. ‘By the blood and body of Christ that judge was wicked! And so was the churl! They deserved to die, as do all false judges and plaintiffs. And the beautiful girl was murdered by her own father. Her beauty came at too high a price, that’s for sure. I know one thing. I will say it over and over again. The so-called gifts of Fortune, and of Nature, can be fatal. Her beauty led her to the slaughter. It is a most sorrowful story. We are the darlings of Fortune and Nature, as I said just now, at our peril. They cause more harm than good.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  We couldn’t afford wood any more than we could afford coal, and Dad wasn’t around to chop and split any, which meant it was up to us kids to gather dead branches and logs from the forest. Finding good, dry wood was a challenge. We trekked along the mountainside, looking for pieces that weren’t waterlogged or rotten, shaking the snow off branches. But we went through the wood awfully quickly, and while a coal fire burns hot, a wood fire doesn’t throw off much heat. We all huddled around the potbellied stove, wrapped in blankets, holding out our hands toward the weak, smoky heat. Mom said we should be thankful because we had it better than pioneers, who didn’t have modern conveniences like window glass and cast-iron stoves. One day we got a roaring fire going, but even then we could still see our breath, and there was ice on both sides of the windows. Brian and I decided we needed to make the fire even bigger and went out to collect more wood. On the way back, Brian stopped and looked at our house. “There’s no snow on our roof,” he said. He was right. It had completely melted. “Every other house has snow on its roof,” he said. He was right about that, too. “This house doesn’t have a lick of insulation,” Brian told Mom when we got back inside. “All the heat’s going right through the roof.” “We may not have insulation,” Mom said as we all gathered around the stove, “but we have each other.” It got so cold in the house that icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling, the water in the sink turned into a solid block of ice, and the dirty dishes were stuck there as if they’d been cemented in place. Even the pan of water that we kept in the living room to wash up in usually had a layer of ice on it. We walked around the house wearing our coats and wrapped in blankets. We wore our coats to bed, too. There was no stove in the bedroom, and no matter how many blankets I piled on top of myself, I still felt cold. I lay awake at night, rubbing my feet with my hands, trying to warm them. We fought over who got to sleep with the dogs—Tinkle, the Jack Russell terrier, and Pippin, a curly-haired mutt who had wandered down through the woods one day—because they kept us warm. They usually ended up in a heap with Mom, because she had the bigger body, and they were cold, too. Brian had bought an iguana at G. C. Murphy, the five-and-dime on McDowell Street, because it reminded him of the desert. He named the lizard Iggy and slept with it against his chest to keep it warm, but it froze to death one night. We had to leave the faucet under the house dripping or the water froze in the pipe.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When I got to the hospital, he was in a bed in the emergency room, his eyes closed. Mom and Lori were standing next to him. “It’s just the machines keeping him alive at his point,” Mom said. I knew Dad would have hated that, spending his final moments in a hospital hooked up to machines. He’d have wanted to be out in the wild somewhere. He always said that when he died, we should put him on a mountaintop and let the buzzards and coyotes tear his body apart. I had this crazy urge to scoop him up in my arms and charge through the doors—to check out Rex Walls–style one last time. Instead, I took his hand. It was warm and heavy. An hour later, they turned the machines off. • • • In the months that followed, I found myself always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was. If I was at work, I’d wish I were at home. If I was in the apartment, I couldn’t wait to get out of it. If a taxi I had hailed was stuck in traffic for over a minute, I got out and walked. I felt best when I was on the move, going someplace rather than being there. I took up ice-skating. I rose early in the morning and made my way through the quiet, dawn-lit streets to the rink, where I laced up my skates so tightly my feet throbbed. I welcomed the numbing cold and even the jolt of my falls on the hard, wet ice. The fast-paced, repetitive maneuvers distracted me, and sometimes I went back at night to skate again, returning home only when it was late and I was exhausted. It took me a while to realize that just being on the move wasn’t enough; that I needed to reconsider everything. • • • A year after Dad died, I left Eric. He was a good man, but not the right one for me. And Park Avenue was not where I belonged. I took a small apartment on the West Side. It had neither a doorman nor a fireplace, but there were large windows that flooded the rooms with light, and parquet floors and a small foyer, just like that first apartment Lori and I had found in the Bronx. It felt right. I went ice-skating less often, and when my skates were stolen, I never replaced them. My compulsion to be always on the move began to fade. But I liked to go for long walks at night. I often walked west toward the river. The city lights obscured the stars, but on clear nights, I could see Venus on the horizon, up over the dark water, glowing steadily. V [image "Images" file=Image00012.jpg] THANKSGIVING I WAS STANDING ON the platform with my second husband, John. A whistle sounded in the distance, red lights flashed, and a bell clanged as the gates were lowered across the roadway.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The melancholic refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled. In this early essay, Freud understands grief to be the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the object and the successful transferral of that cathexis onto a fresh object. In The Ego and the Id, however, Freud revises this distinction between mourning and melancholia and suggests that the identification process associated with melancholia may be “the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (19). In other words, the identification with lost loves characteristic of melancholia becomes the precondition for the work of mourning. The two processes, originally conceived as oppositional, are now understood as integrally related aspects of the grieving process.35 In his later view, Freud remarks that the internalization of loss is compensatory: “When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object’ ” (20). Strictly speaking, the giving up of the object is not a negation of the cathexis, but its internalization and, hence, preservation. What precisely is the topology of the psyche in which the ego and its lost loves reside in perpetual habitation? Clearly, Freud conceptualizes the ego in the perpetual company of the ego ideal which acts as a moral agency of various kinds. The internalized losses of the ego are reestablished as part of this agency of moral scrutiny, the internalization of anger and blame originally felt for the object in its external mode. In the act of internalization, that anger and blame, inevitably heightened by the loss itself, are turned inward and sustained; the ego changes place with the internalized object, thereby investing this internalized externality with moral agency and power. Thus, the ego forfeits its anger and efficacy to the ego ideal which turns against the very ego by which it is sustained; in other words, the ego constructs a way to turn against itself. Indeed, Freud warns of the hypermoral possibilities of this ego ideal, which, taken to its extreme, can motivate suicide.36 The construction of the interior ego ideal involves the internalization of gender identities as well. Freud remarks that the ego ideal is a solution to the Oedipal complex and is thus instrumental in the successful consolidation of masculinity and femininity: The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id: it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against these choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: “You ought to be like this (like your father.)” It also comprises the prohibition: “You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.” (24)

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose “incorporation” as the manner by which that identification is accomplished. Indeed, according to the scheme above, gender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body and that determines, in effect, the living versus the dead body. As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth. The localization and/or prohibition of pleasures and desires in given “erotogenic” zones is precisely the kind of gender-differentiating melancholy that suffuses the body’s surface. The loss of the pleasurable object is resolved through the incorporation of that very pleasure with the result that pleasure is both determined and prohibited through the compulsory effects of the gender-differentiating law. The incest taboo is, of course, more inclusive than the taboo against homosexuality, but in the case of the heterosexual incest taboo through which heterosexual identity is established, the loss is borne as grief. In the case of the prohibition against homosexual incest through which heterosexual identity is established, however, the loss is sustained through a melancholic structure. The loss of the heterosexual object, argues Freud, results in the displacement of that object, but not the heterosexual aim; on the other hand, the loss of the homosexual object requires the loss of the aim and the object. In other words, the object is not only lost, but the desire fully denied, such that “I never lost that person and I never loved that person, indeed never felt that kind of love at all.” The melancholic preservation of that love is all the more securely safeguarded through the totalizing trajectory of the denial. Irigaray’s argument that in Freud’s work the structures of melancholy and of developed femininity are very similar refers to the denial of both object and aim that constitutes the “double wave” of repression characteristic of a fully developed femininity. For Irigaray, it is the recognition of castration that initiates the young girl into “a ‘loss’ that radically escapes any representation.”40 Melancholia is thus a psychoanalytic norm for women, one that rests upon her ostensible desire to have the penis, a desire which, conveniently, can no longer be felt or known.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I began looking through all the junk in the bedroom and finally found Oz on the floor. Someone had slashed him apart with a knife and stolen all the money. I knew it was Dad, but at the same time, I couldn’t believe he’d stoop this low. Lori obviously didn’t know yet. She was in the living room humming away as she worked on a poster. My first impulse was to hide Oz. I had this wild thought that I could somehow replace the money before Lori discovered it was missing. But I knew how ridiculous that was; three of us had spent the better part of a year accumulating the money. It would be impossible for me to replace it in the month before Lori graduated. I went into the living room and stood beside her, trying to think of what to say. She was working on a poster that said TAMMY ! in Day-Glo colors. After a moment, she looked up. “What?” she said. Lori could tell by my face that something was wrong. She stood up so abruptly she knocked over a bottle of india ink, and ran into the bedroom. I braced myself, expecting to hear a scream, but there was only silence and then a small, broken whimpering. • • • Lori stayed up all night to confront Dad, but he didn’t come home. She skipped school the following day in case he returned, but Dad was AWOL for three days before we heard him climbing the rickety staircase to the porch. “You bastard!” Lori shouted. “You stole our money!” “What the goddamn hell are you talking about?” Dad asked. “And watch your language.” He leaned against the door and lit a cigarette. Lori held up the slashed pig and threw it as hard as she could at Dad, but it was empty and nearly weightless. It struck his shoulder lightly, then bounced to the floor. He bent down carefully, as if the floor beneath him could shift at any moment, picked up our ravaged piggy bank, and turned it over in his hands. “Someone sure as hell gutted old Oz, didn’t they?” He turned to me. “Jeannette, do you know what happened?” He was actually half grinning at me. After the whipping, Dad had jacked up the charm with me, and even though I was planning to leave, he could make me laugh when he tried, and he still considered me an ally. But now I wanted to knock him over the head. “You took our money,” I said. “That’s what happened.” “Well, don’t that beat all,” Dad said. He started going on about how a man comes home from slaying dragons, trying to keep his family safe, and all he wants in return for his toil and sacrifice is a little love and respect, but it seemed these days that was just too damn much to ask for.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I should put it away and get to work on another book from scratch. The thing is, I had already spent most of the advance. I went into a very deep state of grief and fear at the post office, and this stuck with me for the next week or so. I was wild with humiliation and deeply afraid for my future. But I called someone who loved my writing, who had encouraged me all along, and she told me to give the book a little space, a little sunshine and fresh air. She said not to pick it up again for a month. She said that everything was going to be Okay, although she did not know exactly what Okay might look like. So I went off to the elephants’ graveyard, renting a room in a huge old house on the Petaluma River. It was very quiet and pastoral. No one knew who I was. Hardly anyone knew where I was. The meadows outside my windows were filled with cows and grass and hay. I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks and waited for my confidence to return. I tried not to make any big decisions about how to salvage the book or my writing life, because the one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. Finally, I found myself ready to look at the book again. I read it through in one sitting and loved it. I thought it was wonderful. A huge mess, granted, but a wonderful mess. I called my editor and told him I knew what I was doing now and that I would prove this to him. He was genuinely happy. There was a huge dilapidated living room in the house where I lived, and one morning I took my three-hundred-page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that would be wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and rewritten to make a great introduction to the two main characters.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) He takes the last one first. Jesus did not choose his task; God chose him for it. At his baptism, there came to Jesus the voice which said: ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2:7). (2) Jesus has gone through the most bitter human experiences and understands what it is to be human with all its strength and weakness. The writer to the Hebrews has four great thoughts about him . (a) He remembers Jesus in Gethsemane. That is what he is thinking of when he speaks of Jesus’ prayers and entreaties, his tears and his cry. The word he uses for cry (kraugē) is very significant. It is an involuntary sound, a cry that is uttered in the stress of some tremendous tension or searing pain. So, the writer to the Hebrews says that there is no agony of the human spirit through which Jesus has not come. The Rabbis had a saying: ‘There are three kinds of prayers, each loftier than the preceding – prayer, crying and tears. Prayer is made in silence; crying with raised voice; but tears overcome all things.’ Jesus knew even the desperate prayer of tears. (b) Jesus learned from all his experiences because he met them all with reverence. The Greek phrase for ‘He learned from what he suffered’ is a linguistic jingle – emathen aph’ hōn epathen. And this is an idea which keeps recurring in the Greek thinkers. They are always connecting mathein, to learn, and pathein, to suffer. Aeschylus, the earliest of the great Greek dramatists, had as a kind of continual text: ‘Learning comes from suffering’ (pathei mathos). He calls suffering a kind of savage grace from the gods. Herodotus declared that his sufferings were acharista mathēmata, ungracious ways of learning. A traditional Irish proverb says of the poets: We learn in suffering what we teach in song. God speaks to us in many experiences of life, and not least in those which try our hearts and souls. But we can hear his voice only when we accept in reverence what comes to us. If we accept it with resentment, the rebellious cries of our own hearts make us deaf to the voice of God. (c) By means of the experiences through which he passed, both the Authorized and the Revised Standard Versions say that Jesus was made perfect (teleioun). Teleioun is the verb of the adjective teleios. Teleios can quite correctly be translated as perfect as long as we remember what the Greeks understood by that perfection. In Greek thought, a thing was teleios if it perfectly carried out the purpose for which it was designed.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  A son or a daughter may go wrong and a father or a mother may forgive; but that forgiveness brings tears, whiteness to the hair, lines to the face, a cutting anguish and then a long, dull ache to the heart. It does not cost nothing. Divine forgiveness is costly. God is love – but he is also holiness . He, least of all, can break the great moral laws on which the universe is built. Sin must have its punishment, or the very structure of life disintegrates. And God alone can pay the terrible price that is necessary before we can be forgiven. Forgiveness is never a case of saying: ‘It’s all right; it doesn’t matter.’ It is the most costly thing in the world. Without the shedding of the heart’s blood, there can be no forgiveness of sins. Nothing brings people to their senses with such arresting violence as seeing the effect of their sin on someone who loves them in this world or on the God who loves them forever, and to say to themselves: ‘It cost that to forgive my sin.’ Where there is forgiveness, someone must be crucified. THE PERFECT PURIFICATION Hebrews 9:23–8 So, then, if it was necessary that the things which are copies of the heavenly realities should be cleansed by processes like these, it is necessary that the heavenly realities themselves should be cleansed by finer sacrifices than those of which we have been thinking. It is not into a man-made sanctuary that Christ has entered – that would be a mere symbol of the things which are real. It is into heaven itself that he entered, now to appear on our behalf before the presence of God. It is not that he has to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest year by year enters into the holy place with a blood that is not his own. Were that so, he would have had to suffer again and again since the world was founded. But now, as things are, once and for all, at the end of the ages, he has appeared with his sacrifice of himself so that our sins should be cancelled. And, just as it is laid down for men to die once and for all and then to face the judgment, so Christ, after being once and for all sacrificed to bear the burden of the sins of many, will appear a second time, not this time to deal with sin, but for the salvation of those who are waiting for him. T HE writer to the Hebrews, still thinking of the supreme effectiveness of the sacrifice which Jesus made, begins with a flight of thought which, even for such an adventurous writer, is amazing.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The marquis was happy with her answer. Yet he pretended otherwise. He looked at her gravely, almost angrily, and left the bedchamber. A short while later he confided in one of his servants, secretly told him what he intended, and dispatched him as a messenger to his wife. This servant was a secret agent, or enforcer, very useful in matters of state. If there was any low or dishonest work to be done, he was the man. The marquis knew well enough that he loved and respected his master, and would ask no questions. He would obey orders. So without delay he went quietly into Griselda’s chamber. ‘Ma dame,’ he said, ‘you must forgive me for coming here. But I must do what my lord has demanded. You know well enough that his commands cannot be averted or evaded. They may cause grief and suffering, I know, but they cannot be challenged. He is our master. That is all there is to it.’ He took a step towards her. ‘And he has ordered me to take this child.’ He said no more. He seized the infant girl and was about to carry her out of the room, with such an expression on his face - well, it seemed that he would murder her on the spot. Griselda was forced to endure all and to be patient. She was as meek, and as quiet, as a lamb. She witnessed the actions of the servant without remonstrance or complaint. The bad reputation of this man preceded him everywhere. His appearance was threatening, his words ominous. Even the hour of his arrival was suspicious. Griselda truly believed that her little daughter was about to be killed before her eyes. But she did not cry out. She did not weep. She was obliged to fulfil the demands of her husband. Yet in the end she was moved to speak. She pleaded with the servant, as if he were a good and noble man, to let her kiss her little girl before she died. She cradled the child on her lap and caressed her. She made the sign of the cross on her forehead, and then kissed her again. She began to murmur to her in a soft voice, as if she were singing a lullaby. ‘Farewell, my little child. I will never see you again. But since I have made the sign of the blessed Lord Jesus, who died for us on a wooden cross, I trust that He will take your soul to paradise. For my sake you will die tonight.’ I do not think that any nurse could have endured so much pain and sorrow, let alone a mother. What woman would not have broken down in tears? Yet Griselda stayed as firm and resolute as ever. Very quietly she said to the official, ‘Here. Take back the child. The little girl is yours.’

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  And this simply wasn’t true. Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world’s worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you. All the available baby books recommended things like white noise to soothe the yowling little savant. So I’d sit there by Sam’s side and play him Sierra Club tapes of rivers at night, complete with crickets and owls and frogs, and he’d look over worriedly for a moment, like “Are you out of your mind? Why don’t you just play me a tape of shark fights?” And then he would really start to cry. I would have felt so relieved if there had been a book written by another mother who admitted that she sometimes wanted to grab her infant by the ankles and swing him over her head like a bolo. So I went ahead and started writing one myself, as a present, as a kind of road map for other mothers. I would have been so relieved, too, if after Pammy got sick when Sam was eight months old, there had been a book about losing your best friend that was real but also funny. So I ended up trying to write one, weaving together these two stories, of Sam and Pammy, for both of them and for anyone who might know anyone like either of them. A couple of years later, a few months after Pammy died, two close friends of ours had a baby who was born so damaged that he died at five months old. I began to wonder if I was some sort of carrier. Sam and I spent a lot of time with the parents and their little son. They did such an amazing job and taught me so much, and their son taught me so much that I wanted other people to know about it. I wanted to write about it as a present for the parents, so that this baby would keep on living. So all those months when Brice was alive, I scribbled down notes on index cards, with no idea of whether I would ever actually write a story about him. I watched all that went on inside me: how I automatically think that closing down is safe, but that really staying open and loving is safer, because then we’re connected to all that life and love. And I watched Sam watch Brice and scribbled some of this down on index cards. I felt self-conscious and vaguely ashamed that so much of what I’d written lately concerned suffering and death, but I let myself take notes anyway. Brice died that May.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given. The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly “clear” view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, “let me make one thing perfectly clear” and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of “clarity,” and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does “transparency” keep obscure? I grew up understanding something of the violence of gender norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically anomalous body, deprived of family and friends, living out his days in an “institute” in the Kansas prairies; gay cousins forced to leave their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my own tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and homes. All of this subjected me to strong and scarring condemnation but, luckily, did not prevent me from pursuing pleasure and insisting on a legitimating recognition for my sexual life. It was difficult to bring this violence into view precisely because gender was so taken for granted at the same time that it was violently policed. It was assumed either to be a natural manifestation of sex or a cultural constant that no human agency could hope to revise. I also came to understand something of the violence of the foreclosed life, the one that does not get named as “living,” the one whose incarceration implies a suspension of life, or a sustained death sentence. The dogged effort to “denaturalize” gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of “real” politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct).